Carkeek Poems: Animals

From time to time
as I walk the beach
a particular crow will amble ahead of me
seeming to track my progress

If I match its pace it will keep walking
hopping
taking little bursts of flight
until it reaches its companions
in their loose, quarrelling-but-cooperative bunches

Embarrassed, I veer aside
grateful for the guide
but as yet unclear regarding the great dark communal mystery
into which I am being led

Safety in numbers:

They gather for their secret rituals
eyes glinting in the moonlit dark
they have no use for fire
or incantations
just a solidarity in building
the diagrams
the plans
woven into their brains

What could I build
with unhindered access to such instincts?

Often as I walk up the beach to my poem-writing place
some words have formed in my mind:
the crystallization of a thought sparked by a pattern of seaweed
or wave
or remnants of beach fire

Today nothing of the sort had formed
and I was preparing to meet that emptiness
maybe for once letting my pen
my nerves
my thoughtless knowing
drive the poem into being
or allow it to take wing

And then I spied three large white seagulls
crouching on an ephemeral island of rocks
as I approached I saw they were not seagulls but a trio of pelicans
aesthetically posing with their long orange beaks
pure white otherwise

They scrapped my void-plans
called attention to themselves
made themselves into my poem

If the Divine wants to shape
my aspiration to formlessness
into a subject
who am I to argue?

Don’t say the age of wonders is behind us!
Don’t throw your reductive soulless materialism at me!

I saw a wonder of wonders today:
I saw a seal in the form of a man,
a man in the form of a seal,
in any case a being who straddled worlds
just as I straddle worlds.

His body was black like a seal
his head was covered with grey hair
ears, eyes, and nose like a man.
He glided through the water like a seal
making his way up the shore with slow, sure strokes
but windmilling like a man.

I have to admit he did not dive
and I must note that there was something strange with him, under him, very un-seal-like
white and firm like a…
…like a surfboard.

Ah, a surfboard, a wetsuit, a man paddling unaccountably on the  waveless Sound.
Does my sense of enchantment collapse?
It does not. Too late!
The gulls are here, the mountains are here, the man on the surfboard is here
And I am full of wonder.

As I was about to face today’s blank page
without vision or inspiration on an apparently featureless day
a dog came by my log
enraptured by the seaweed odors

He puttered by, heedless of me
(like his master, who often sits nearby absorbed in his phone)
his coloring, however, complements the alder patterns
His restless energy reminds me of crows
So maybe despite my judgements about all dogs on this beach, lawbreaking dogs,
he belongs here too
as much as I do

We are all visitors

A group of newly arrived ducks
not the year-round resident mallards
make their way in a flotilla toward the nutrient-rich creek
the seagulls infiltrate them and seek to cut them off

The summer equilibrium is nearing its end
The crows dominate my alder-log perch
and reluctantly give way

I too feel a season of new and more unstable patterns
coming over me
My long and mildly depressed rest
giving way to the intersecting energies of past and future

seagulls and ducks
in the end they will all find their roosting places