Gulls

These gulls hang always over the city, as symbols of an undivided being.

I have turned from the morning doorways of bars to watch them, the taste in my mouth of rum or vomit. I have seen them poised there as I come away from my girl, the smell of her still in my nostrils and filled with the power of knowledge and despair.

They are not pure, for all their whiteness. Only the dead are pure. I have seen them beside the wharves, gabbling over bread and garbage, their necks like serpents, their eyes stony and glittering.

But they alone are free. Balancing on the great wind, they enter as strangers this labyrinth of stone. Perhaps they are the unborn, the children of genesis, nursed still on the face of landless ocean, and free.

Because they cannot imagine death.

1948 (22)