Fortress

To the Gull

To the Gull Does a poem pre-exist as dawn pre-exists, as the dagger smelt shine before being caught, taking breath into finality? You wait nearby with the curved, resentful nose of medieval peasantry, your still, disinterested eye coming straight from the mind of Durer, whose grotesques line the walls at school.... Watching you, I don't care that my body will die, for it has not known its proper freedom, nor believed the great lie, that it is good to be alone; but you, mybeautiful, mindless one, have made your decision against the will, to go with the inevitable, tucking your brief orange legs into your belly. I have seen you shattered on the bridge as you landed, your life lost, have seen your shallow threes against the evening sky, or beside me on the beach, abandoned in the sand like an old tennis shoe, 69 and in the picture where the girl who has no gift for flight holds the red ribbon around your throat and rides you— Oh, take me too! Over the tortured cypresses, over the freighters stopped like words, for the spell is broken and the muse is dead, do you see his body on the battered sloop? Why are you at the rail again, kelp caught in your claw, tracing with your poet's eye another blinding circle you must fill? 70 About the author Brenda Hillman is the author of two chapbooks, Coffee, 3 A.M. (1982) and Autumn Sojourn (1995), and of four full-length collections from Wesleyan. Her awards include the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Californiawith her husband and daughter, and teaches at St.Mary's College in Moraga, where she is poet-inresidence . ...