I’m standing on land
looking out at the bay
at an orange sail skimming past the islands.
A cormorant bobs and dips
and dives between the waves,
opens its gullet and gulps
a silvery fish down,
which is why we call a group
of cormorants, bobbing and dipping
and diving a gulp
but there is only one
cormorant today, and a single hawk
soaring above the orange sail,
and only one osprey that I can see
roosting in the tall, gray
skeleton tree on top of the clutter
she built with every-which-way sticks
that somehow stick together.
Each time I pass beneath her,
she whistles a warning cry
passed down from bird to bird
over the course of thirteen million years,
just as word by word
the rosy-fingered dawn and wine-dark sea
came down to me.
As the orange sail grows closer,
the sun-burned sailor at the helm
waves and becomes
the weary warrior heading home
to a wife and son he never wanted
to leave, heading home
after ten years of war
and ten more of misadventures
with pigs and birds
that sang with human voices.
A breeze stirs the leaves in the birches
behind me, sets the yellow kelp
gripping the rocks along the shore
into a rippling motion:
To gulp
means to swallow,
a swallow’s a bird,
a group of swallows,
a flight;
a flight
to explain why
the cormorant’s eye is blue: oh,
it’s because
First Cormorant swallowed the sky.
A seal’s black head pops up,
shakes its whiskers, disappears.
looking out at the bay
at an orange sail skimming past the islands.
A cormorant bobs and dips
and dives between the waves,
opens its gullet and gulps
a silvery fish down,
which is why we call a group
of cormorants, bobbing and dipping
and diving a gulp
but there is only one
cormorant today, and a single hawk
soaring above the orange sail,
and only one osprey that I can see
roosting in the tall, gray
skeleton tree on top of the clutter
she built with every-which-way sticks
that somehow stick together.
Each time I pass beneath her,
she whistles a warning cry
passed down from bird to bird
over the course of thirteen million years,
just as word by word
the rosy-fingered dawn and wine-dark sea
came down to me.
As the orange sail grows closer,
the sun-burned sailor at the helm
waves and becomes
the weary warrior heading home
to a wife and son he never wanted
to leave, heading home
after ten years of war
and ten more of misadventures
with pigs and birds
that sang with human voices.
A breeze stirs the leaves in the birches
behind me, sets the yellow kelp
gripping the rocks along the shore
into a rippling motion:
To gulp
means to swallow,
a swallow’s a bird,
a group of swallows,
a flight;
a flight
to explain why
the cormorant’s eye is blue: oh,
it’s because
First Cormorant swallowed the sky.
A seal’s black head pops up,
shakes its whiskers, disappears.
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Amy Gordon’s poems have appeared in Antique Magazine, Ekphrastic Review, The Massachusetts Review, Slant, Clarion, and others. She is the author of two chapbooks: Deep Fahrenheit (Prolific Press), The Yellow Room (Finishing Line Press), and Leaf Town is forthcoming with Slate Roof Press, (winner of the 2023 Elyse Wolf Chapbook Prize.) Amy Gordon lives in western Massachusetts.
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