EVEN BIGGER BIRDS
TWO GIGANTIC BIRDS
THE GIGANTIC BIRD |
The common tern berates
the stoic cormorant on the pylon.
His screeches, like gun powder,
leak from his extended throat.
The bay is the bright sun beneath
them where the fisherman hasn’t
caught a thing. I drop back
and throw a long bomb
off my wife’s breast. I think
the fisherman feels, out of empathy
maybe, that I am being mean.
In my binoculars—a lighthouse
on the promontory, the tip
of the wispy peninsula, little tethered
dinghies against the vacant sky.
The sand is not warm, not cold.
It is littered with driftwood
and seaweed. Coarse shells.
The bungalow behind us
stirs. My friend who doesn’t know
I’m out of town calls; I don’t know how
to talk to him right now.
He says he can hear the tern.
In real life, I say, glancing
at the nearby bird in the binoculars,
he blows up. But in the cartoon
he blows up. My friend says
he’ll talk to me when I get back.
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