I watch it breaking from a cliff,
a gannet with its white-silk wings,
chipped off, a piece of granite, swung out wide.
Through shelves of light it rises,
through the plum-ripe dawn,
its fringe of shadows, blood-bright clouds
accumulating orchids, froths of bloom.
Way up, it hangs an eye upon the world.
Cold sea bird, risen out of time
through mizzling fog to ice-blue air,
I know the journey you in flight describe:
from rock to water, water into fog,
from fog to sunlit drizzle into air—
to live forever in the air’s idea,
mindless as a star,
a gannet in perpetual blue flight,
pure breath above the world.