Breaking Bread with Birds
(A poem dusted off from the archives. Polished with The Snow Leopard in mind.)
A lone surfer paddles for a Sunday wave.
A sea lion parallels through the morning teal.
Seafaring mammals nod to one another.
They speak the language older than words.
Land sucks.
Never get in the boat.
Find a lake that has never seen a boat.
They do exist in Oregon.
A gull eats two hunks of my Tillamook cheese.
Another gull tears a clam apart at the wrack line.
I hurl a slice of fruitcake to the gull.
He nods, too.
A driftwood fort decays behind me.
The other fort I built is gone.
Driftwood is waiting.
I build alone, waiting.
Sandpipers and sanderlings dart in the wet sand.
They make sustainable laws by silent acclimation.
Wind blows.
The south jetty disintegrates.
A freighter brings and old ocean over the bar.
A sand dollar cashes out.
I sit on a white driftlog.
I eat my breakfast and break bread with birds.
I write on a 20-year old plastic toy.
The log will outlast us both.
A crow emerges.
She’s scouting fruitcake.
The gull blocks him out like a quality power forward.
Tangerine peels will suffice.
Cirrus clouds begin to give way.
The sun bides its burnout time.
Somewhere a Prometheus is still chained to a rock.
But not here.