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Sunday 16 May 2010

Harbingers of Strange


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File:California seagulls mill valley water  mud.JPG



Two confused gulls coming in off the water
Out of the warm cold into the cold warm
Signifying the approach
Of yet another summer winter
Storm



File:Seagulls.JPG


California Gulls (Larus californicus) in the mud near the water, Mill Valley, California: photo by Joe Monica, 2009
California Gulls (Larus californicus), Antelope Island, Utah: photo by Shengzhi Li, 2003

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just like a poetic contradiction, the warm cold and the cold warm, the winter and the summer. A bias. Short but strong piece. Delightful.

The gulls here in San Martín have the strangest behaviour, especially in the spring. The flocks fly at full speed over the main avenue every afternoon, coming down from the highlands towards the lake. As soon as the race is over and they fly above the water body, they cry out in bliss and make circles to take advantage of the hot air currents to hover around.

I just love that =)

Anonymous said...

oh the ducks are so well organized
but the gulls go their own way!

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE said...

Tom,

Yes, another almost summer winter storm coming our way (today) or is it just fog dripping from the leaves?

5.17

first grey light in fog against invisible
ridge, birds chirping on branch in right
foreground, no sound of wave in channel

painting of twelve drawings,
remember their shared

“see” and have seen as such,
the look, of the seer

grey whiteness of fog above green ridge,
unseen birds on branches across from it

TC said...

Lucy,

Ah, the bliss of being a gull riding on the air currents of the Andes!


Zev,

Yes, the incoming gulls, before a storm, congregating around the un-emptied urban garbage cans in the midst of the collapsing concrete infrastructure, seem almost as disorganized in their habit patterns as every other remnant-fed creature around here. While commuters plow by, in a morning frenzy to keep all their ducks in a row.


Steve,

Aye, more weather coming in. Perhaps it's the ramshackle nature of the settlement here, but this winter has continued to astound. Late eighteenth century mariners' logs, describing the springtime weather off the Northwest Coast (from Vancouver Island northward), give accounts of conditions a lot like this. Only warmer.

The harbingers of climate change may be called merely subjective/anecdotal, but that's a view from somebody's airconditioned office X thousands of miles away. Here it evidently and simply is what it is.

~otto~ said...

"Out of the warm cold into the cold warm" and "summer winter storm"

thank you for that and this whole thing

TC said...

Otto,

Thank you for that again and again.

(A frigid 44 degrees here in the darklightening sing-singfeeling nightmorning.)