Friday Poem: "Pelican"

Here is another poem (like "Anatomy of a Five-Lined Skink") where the speaker seeks visual analogies among different natural textures, colors, and materials.

Pelican

The endless sky above the sea is a web of crossing flight paths—
gulls, sandpipers, kingfishers, the occasional crow, somehow
out of place.  Eventually your eye gets used to them all, the way
it stops noticing telephone wires and starlings in places 
where the sky isn’t mirrored by the gray sea.

But the pelican is different: the pterodactylian wingspan,
beating deliberately against the constant ocean wind,
seizes your attention as the great bird works past the window.
The mossy tufts of feathers on the head seem baldly
prehistoric.  Its colors: the gray-brown of saltstained 
driftwood, barnacle-white, sand, mermaid’s-purse black.

And parting the breeze like the prow of a ship is that great
beak, seemingly the whole of its head.  A polished strip 
of palmetto bark, and beneath, the folded pouch:
a mouth large enough to contain the salt bath 
in which we all once twitched blind,  
and bear it to the skies like a strange, 
weatherbeaten dinosaur-angel.

This poem appeared in The Carolina Quarterly Vol. 51 No. 3.