At The Waters Edge

Smooth, reptilian, soaring,
a gull wheels away from this rock
leaving the scraps I was throwing,

and settles again in a flurry
of foam and plumed air. The wild seaweed
crawls crimson and green in my shadow.

The gull's flight aches in my shoulders.
It will suffer no change, cannot offer
itself to be changed, cannot suffer:

the forms born of earth are supported
by earth, body-sheltering, guiless.
"What is truth?" asks the heart, and is told:

You will suffer, and gaze at the fact
of the world until pain's after-image
is as real as pain; all your strength

will be fretted to grains of distress;
you will speak to the world; what you offer
will toss upon evil and good

to be snatched or disdained. You will find
all nature exhausted as beauty
though radiant as mystery still.

You will learn what was breathed into dust
the sixth day, when the fowls of the air
wheeled over your flightless dominion.

"What is truth?" cries the heart, as the gull
rocks in changeless estate, and I turn
to my kingdom of sorrowing change.