High Gannet

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.