Yet it is not the
death sign
that the curlews
bring, but only
the memory of life, of
a high
beauty passing
swiftly,
as the curlew passes,
leaving
us in solitude on an
empty
beach, with summer
gone,
and the wind blowing.
Peter
Matthiessen
The Shorebirds
of North
America
moon,
below you
the wind is churning
drops of water
and ice into a bolt
of lavender-gray cloth.
Each length floats
in a ceaseless rise and
fall
that’s hard to measure,
navigate, paint or, like now,
believe.
It’s all as brief
as breathing.
From here, the shapes,
even roiling,
seem benign,
suspended in a calm
boil. But wind
is incessant,
and its speed
defendant on who
has a hand in it all,
a who
some call gods,
some call chance,
and some don’t make
a call at all,
and know only the slack
of it makes us all
diviners,
our time inside it all
a degree,
less or more,
of a tilting and rolling
beneath the binnacle
that marks everything
that ever pulls
or tilts on the gimbal
of such a cloud.
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