They Shout

—all day, the men that fail to bring coyotes
out of storm. In the beginning, they poise
in narrow rows like garden flowers, heavy
with hesitance of failure of what happens;

then the thunder and the lightning, and
they spread. Do they find the lightning,
wrapped in yellow, intimidating? Waves
rise,up—to bees and to birds—like wet,

blue answers of Babylon’s tower and not
just waves; the harbour rocks in the wind;
and men sprawls beneath tufts and bushes
like antelopes for shelter, some dead,

some fallen, how they hold and get held
by each other. I attempt to help but no
help is given. If the light, in its wash-grey,
means Armageddon— I will die here, as

the rest; look up and know and, in knowing,
the light will turn, the sky become sacredom. . .
What would the flesh taste, if flesh is all
I could taste? I mark the gull that passes

over—in fright—in feathers of course,
imagine, as with a leaf that seems to stop
half-flight, mid-flight, through the light,
the burned feathers of a gull, its roasted
flesh. I lie, in tufts. The sky turns blue to
sacredom.