The Gulls (The Eagle)
When the water is windswept and turbid, the breakers less like delicate keys thrumming
hypnotically, the elegant purr of a piano scale when fingers ripple cleanly down the
instrument’s backbone, and more like hard slaps against the packed sand, when the lake is
the same carp nose gray from the shore to the skyline, the same goose pimpled surface
undulating imperfectly, more unpredictable than anything, the hungry gulls falteringly float,
bodies caught up in the gusts above the tips of the cottonwood holding up the dune, wings
stretched over the hard air currents, over the sand through which as much is visible to them
as in the water, wherein yesterday I watched them dive as gracefully as gulls could dive into
the surface and pluck herring after herring that, having given up, hung slackly at the surface,
stupefied, and their pearly tails flashed half-heartedly from the gull’s dull beaks as they
dashed over the tops of them and into the air, wherein they would swallow their catch and
repeat that same greedy gesture all morning, they feasted, and even near the shore gathering
one, two, three, and suddenly six. It’s true, I’ve never considered gulls as birds that gravitate
toward each other like geese, like cardinals, like starlings, vulgar as they are, how could
proximity, how could tenderness come naturally? And it’s true I’ve never seen seagulls even
touch each other, though I have seen them collaborate to signal and distract, I’ve heard them
shriek and conspire, their ugly rasping harks, shearing the space between towels lined along
the burnt-sand beach as they celebrated having emptied the contents of a swimmer’s purse,
the Cheeto-lined pockets of an ex-boyfriend’s jeans. And this morning, too, after I told my
son I saw an eagle soar past the window, his expression was unphased on the FaceTime
camera. I said he didn’t seem hungry or cold or in a hurry, just passing, the way a bald eagle
might, the way a sated predator might, under the cover of nothing, bored with the same
hunting, the same scurrying beneath him, the way a man on his way to work will keep
walking the same crowded path each morning singing to himself the same irritating tune.
That’s how you know you’re in America, my son said, and we laughed. Of course, he knows
already there’s more power in our talons than our tongues (the trick, of course, to learn to
use the tongue). The gulls, the plover, the hummingbird, too, respond accordingly, retreating
to the interior of the ashy cottonwood. Even the jay ducking in the dune grass. And after my
son and I said goodbye, I thought about how what I might have said was that we also know
we’re in America by how our feelings of sanctuary change from state to state, city to city,
forest to garden, by testing the imaginary lines scrawled, the borders between the base of the
lake and the air with the gulls and how overnight all the lake’s clear depth for hunting is only
turbid water ready to pull your body under, and I wanted to say more about how danger
hangs ready inside us, a gull waiting to pierce the surface with its thirsting, an eagle flexing
hard along the beachline, daring anything to try him. Certainly, the national bird wouldn’t
ever appreciate the fear and relief one could feel on a cross country road trip, knowing at the
border there’s some sudden law against him, or not, or the shocking relief a woman, having
been stripped of her uterus, having already had her necessary abortions, the selective
reduction, her impenetrable euphemism, might feel when her feet hedge four corners at once,
her unmedicated procedure involving such careful impalement, a thick sterile needle
through the skin of the abdomen not once but twice, to reach the uterus, to reduce three
budding bodies to one, the success of which is predicated upon passivity, not flinching at
very sight of the instrument, the pressure of its steel in the stomach, but instead melting into
the surroundings, gray sky in a gray lake, becoming more bed than occupant, more dune
than bird nesting in its grasses, and how unbearable, how much more like betrayal, denying
the instinct to fight back – though at least, finally, here we’ve arrived at the heart of the poem
about an eagle and gulls, neither of which I ever loved much anyway. And now I love even
less, though I’m working on it. I’m in recovery. The wolfish birds’ bluntness stripped of any
majesty, especially the gull, a straight scavenger, loner, user, tag-a-long, plundering garbage
mouth. And there are so many names I, too, have conjured for myself, which change like the
depth of visibility of water depending on the day, depending on whether I can look at
anything hard enough to see it. Sometimes the voice of the doctor saying you’ll die, you’ll all
die, ringing in my ear in the morning, her voice the same voice that said I didn’t have to
watch as my spouse told me the story of an island where the waves made no sound upon the
shore, where the sand was just as bright as the love I had for our one maybechild, the one I
hoped to save, and for myself who I also was trying to save, I think, I think I was trying to
save her. I don’t know what I saved her from. Sometimes the voice in my head mumbles out
the words I spoke when I saw their tiny figures curled into each other, sharing the same
micro-placenta, on the screen before I can silence it with the clasp of my hand, when I saw
the needle entering their bodies where I knew the doctor knew where the gathering of cells
that would be their hearts were flitting. Sometimes it’s the voice in my head that reminds me
I said nothing after all. I could only watch what was happening to me happen to me, a
stunned fish on its back, belly up at the surface of the water, head dipping toward the
depths, the pressure of gull beak making me suddenly dizzy. There was a chance we could all
die, wasn’t there? But wasn’t there a chance we could all live? Much smaller, though, right?
She said that. There was a choice I had to make and I made it. And sometimes I think the
voice in my head tells me I didn’t make it. That everyone else made the choice, and I floated
instead like a gull over the surface of its water, searching for the lone fish separated from the
school, for any glittering evidence to feast upon, anything certain to chew and swallow, to
feed the eventual wreckage in my body, something physical, something obvious, something I
could dive into and maybe never resurface from. I still feel that way sometimes. Sometimes
the gull. Sometimes the memory of fish. Sometimes the licked-clean bones at the bottom of
the frozenover lake. Sometimes the gull in the sightline of an eagle who would know, just by
the height of his soaring, all the business below him. No one is eating today, so stop your
trying. He knew my secrets before I knew them myself, borders dissolved at such a great
height, wanting me to take the risks anyway, choke down the shimmering lie before he could
swoop in and kill me, before I could martyr myself on more turbulent water, if that’s what I
really wanted. If there’s still time.