The pelican of urban myth swooping
away with syllables of Chihuahua
leash-chain trickling from its beak
at the owner crying down the beach
can’t have been more hunter-insouciant
than this wadded water-skier in bikers’
jacket wings now braking to assume
its seat on the lunchtime peak of tide.
Does that child’s sock of dog, though, dropped
for its very chain, get pulled by it down
a boggling counter-chain to drowned zero?
Or does it rock back, tickling asphalt after
jerking fans across the floor of the palms’
idling forest of helicopter feathers?