Spring

The pelicans are back. I wanted you to see it,
their wings scrutable and gliding in a way so

foreign to me, like machines cheerily producing.
I can’t bear who I’ve become. I am like the gular,

an ugly word for throat. Did you know they have ridges
atop their bills, knobs that look like the names of girls

I knew, those Daryl’s and Susan’s who would also glide,
how home is everywhere for the prettily rich? DDT

briefly extinguished brown pelicans, who stoop powerfully
now on Louisiana’s lethal bridges. Trajectory has been

on my mind, the knowing atoms ahead, already there
to shape us into a chemical choice. The lines of their forms

at sunset, both awe and not-. Memory is the hand
touching without consent, which I cave to and present

as a gift, my sundering. My misery, too, can glide
indelicately, and when it lands, all it can do is land. Is this

why I fail at love poems, for all I’ve never seen. No.
Love waddles by a garden window like an injured possum,

its gait so familiar, the mammal’s anti-grace. That it knows
its headed to die in the hedge, that it knows where to go.