Sunday, November 9, 2014

Gull and Crab

Can you find the crab in this picture? It's like a hidden object puzzle to me. Click to enlarge. 
No problem for the herring gull, though. The bird, Larus argentatus, is in adult winter plumage. 
Crab dinner. 
This poem comes to mind -- A Green Crab's Shell, by Mark Doty, 1953

Not, exactly, green: 
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved 
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot 
know what his fantastic 
legs were like -- 

though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded

scuttling works 
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws'

gesture of menace
and power. A gull's
gobbled the center,

leaving this chamber
--size of a demitasse--
open to reveal

a shocking, Giotto blue. 
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin, 

this little traveling case 
comes with such lavish lining! 
Imagine breathing

surrounded by 
the brilliant rinse
of summer's firmament. 

What color is 
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die, 

if we could be opened 
into this -- 
if the smallest chambers

of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky. 

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