Postcard

This postcard is about the paragraph of gulls
over the seiner, especially its topic-sentence gull
trailing all the rest by the approximate length
of a second and invisible paragraph.

He is an argument perhaps for slowing down
or for returning to the pier or shoal.

At my feet lies a single days-dead gull
gutted no doubt by his own kind
or so I surmise from the ideographs of gull-
footprints pressed around his form;

or if not a non-alphabetic script
then choreography for this dance of death;

one foot it almost seems to have been,
a one-legged angry gull
repeating tarentellasmically the same
three-tined jot beginning where it ended:

such is passion at least in sand
until wind and rain remove it.

And now I have so filled my postcard
no room is left for the address
but who is where specifically
when your courier is the wind?

*

Different from the last poem -- more like what I really should be writing, perhaps: seeking a lyric tension, balancing with more risk between meaning and form.

After reading varied poets -- Billy Collins, who is good and fun when he isn't just imitating himself; Joshua Corey, a new book called Severance Songs that I am enjoying -- abstract verse to Collins' representational; Veronica Forrest-Thomson, a Brit critic/poet who committed suicide in 1975 -- she was young, but very sharp; the poems are playful, often responding to Wittgenstein; they are a balance between abstract and representational, in a different way. Also, an interesting little find at Half Price Books -- Pierre Seghers, Piranesi -- semi-abstract lyrics inspired by the semi-abstract etchings of the artist.

So -- what I feel as a problem to solve: how to be clear (an urgency I feel in poetry), but also make it new (for myself, anyway); how to find the balance between the physicality of language and the security of making sense?

The gulls, though -- they came out of a very old notebook I pulled from the closet recently; notes and drafts from twenty or so years ago, most of it flailing about, abandoned. One of the poems in Mad Flights is a letter of sorts to Paul Bowen, a sculptor I knew in Provincetown. Yukiko (my wife) had sold some of his work in Japan in the early nineties; she arranged a lucrative commission for him, and asked me to write a poem in collaboration. Paul's work is native to the Cape Cod beaches; my gull was some of the discarded matter from the poem I wrote, tryign to capture the same smells and textures of Paul's work.

So in this new poem -- cannibalizing failed efforts from my earlier self, you could say (with a little animal cannibalism in the poem); combined with my own memories of Provincetown, long walks alone on the dunes and beaches -- a postcard, meant perhaps for that earlier self, who is truly in the wind.