Who would not speak, in their quieter fancies,
as a gannet coasts the blue—to rise, halt
without breaking wing, and kamikaze
downward at breakneck speed, break the salt
water surface, plunge with dead-eyed accuracy
the ice-shock deep, then splash to resurface
with a glittered life writhing in the beak?
Who would not lip such a sentence?
So I would wind myself up to a peak,
lift off from the plains, then relax
and stretch out to soar, dip and turn,
but there’d be some dark slick of pitch to tax
such flight, and I’d splutter, coast-bound and waxed
with the tar-and-gicked feathers of a rigid tern.