Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

Some summer mornings I resist the invitation to greet the day

on the page, murmur excuses within the crowded clamor – too cold,

too gray, too late – then the seagull flies overhead, mouth dangling

dark matter extracted from a neighbor’s gutter, to the nest I cannot see

but must be close.

Another – the same one? – approaching from a different angle

flies over the roof.  It too is transporting. And now, empty beaked,

it flies a small circle then soars, wings seemingly unmoving,

toward the train yard at the bottom of the hill.

Again it flies just over my part of the roof, my balcony, the stubborn

blanket-wrapped writer on the perennially cold 4th of July, this time

sailing close enough for me to see brown dry leaves and dirt in its beak

and I realize: we are all in our nests of found objects, laboring to bring

the next to life, a process invisible to all who cannot – will not – see us,

morning-cold, scanning the still-sleepy urban tract for the sturdy

and the soft, the discarded and unused we weave together, birthing

our new horizon.

We see what is set to emerge when we look from above – not within –

our sphere of the known, familiar footpaths that lull us into forgetting

stillness is just one phase. It is time to cross over, meet our new identity,

tinged with the unfamiliar taste of twigs and dead grass.