After Eamon Grennan’s “Start of March, Connemara”
You ask how the gulls find the right angle in the gale,
how they adapt to the current and let it take them
the way they were going. I could ask the same of you:
how do you find thumbed and wind-scumbled,
thrusting them together like lost lovers,
letting them glance off each other, polished stones
on our tongues? Or glitterwings making their mark,
a dance linguists call the fricative,
a word I love because it is what it means,
unlike palindrome, which resists mirroring itself
and sends me, instead, to a girl I knew in college,
the one from Glenelg — g-l-e-n-e-l-g, the same
forward and back. She had hips that looked good
in boy jeans and a way of making the professor
believe she’d done the reading when she hadn’t
even bought the book. Do you see what just happened,
how I started in your lyrical world of shorelines
and wave-peaks and wound up recording
slumber party giggles through a thin wall? Your gulls:
maybe they don’t harness wind after all.
Maybe they give in to each gust and forsake their plans,
having learned long ago to want what they have.