Cormorant
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
William
Butler Yeats
He
Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Walking in the thin crust,
the old snow covered what the wind had,
leaving it banked on the pier
post, allowed. All
the bootprints –
size man or boy, climbed the (how?)
tide rising pier ladders
without losing one moment.
Behind me the bald eagle is on the tallest
rising pine, watching probably
the gulls and torment of crows.
It all goes round, this winter
on this working pier, local
boats and boats from Nova Scotia,
tightened to the posts, holding
on. But I’d like to
know
how the cormorant came to be
hollow-skulled & flat as an aged
ichthys print? Here
the ink is still
black black feather, the used
broom-straw blonde of its bill
ajar against the drove over snow.
Empty eye-bone, a crow maybe
noted the dull nictitating lid
draining its gloss to the creosoted
timber decking. Wounded? Unable
to rise? It must’ve tumbled
from the pier-post or cleat & lain
prostrate & maybe the tread-wide winter
tires, flattening it fish-like but
didn’t meddle and plowed right
into nature. Summers
I see
these cormorants, their wing
span wide sun drying the water from
their last dives.
Dense-boned,
they can’t rise with all that mass
of themselves, of water falling off
them & back into the sea. This beast,
stark black feather against the white
of the snow, I notice odd lot
of blonde on its bill, on the webbing
between its toes, is all but gone.
A faint tallow, like wax.
What more is there to do?
It is stiff against this pier. What more
is there to do
but walk off, & leave it froze to
its winter lot, cast against the snow,
stuck till sometime early next
spring when all the winter will melt
for good, and that same fisherman,
nonchalant in all his duties, lifts it off
the deck and tosses it to the tide
before descending
that ladder to his fishing
boat, toe hold holding, toe hold
letting go.
