Gulls

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Gulls
By Lynne Potts

Stopped mid-way between a song sparrow's deft bells
on telephone wires, a mockingbird's commentary,

and all our talk, I am thinking we are on a hollow roll,
bewildered, not wholly there. It's a bleached-white day

and only a few dunes up Fisher's Landing to the beach
house taking in noon light over green sea waving,

least terns marking the minutes in airy arcs. This is how
to live forever, you say, though there's a dissenting air

about the bone-gray clapboards, telephone pole's
straggly black hairs looped behind ears where cormorants

droop their-tar pit feathers, in a state of resignation.
Take the Hopper painting of a white-washed house

atop some dunes; make it purple with pale blue plaster.
How long will this last? you ask, changing your tune about time.

Meanwhile the gulls come and go: some common, some
herring, some ringed, some black back, some laughing.