After-Music

Pelican

12 P e L i C a n i sought his Lodging, which is at the signe of the sad Pelican. —Andrew Marvell, “Fleckno, an english Priest at rome” The city thinks it knows you by your sign, bird with the downcast beak, sad pelican, but you can wing it, glide above the brine, letting your hunger ride a ten-foot span. Here on the street, you listen to the whine of carts and starlings, the shuffling of a man too thin to hope for lodging at your sign, a random syllable, a charlatan— that’s me, a thread snipped out of the design. if i could stroke your neck, sad pelican, that curve of feathered flesh, that muscled line might lift me out of this quotidian unease. My hand that ambles like a vine might touch the sea-swoop of your bony spine. ...