On the subject of pelicans, Greg Kosmicki send me what he called his "Goose and Pelican" poem. It's a neat poem. The part that particularly struck me was this pelican description:
when I saw the pelicans with their gangly necks
pursuing their strange preoccupation with being birds
when they obviously have not been designed for it
with rain slicker beaks and driftwood-chunk shaped bodies.
See below to read the whole poem, "Migration." It's from Greg Kosmicki's book "We have always been coming to this morning." Enjoy it!
Migration
"See Dad there they are! There's some more of those birds!"
"Ah, yes! The geese! I thought it was the geese
you saw last night!"
It must have been like a vision to her--
have you ever seen them, flying at night over a city
their bellies lit from the glare of lamps
a surreal procession of distracted birds
looking for a place to land
where community memory must tell them
here is our place to land
here is where the fathers and mothers slept and fed?
But it is night, they are tired
there are no marshes, no bogs
no fields full of grain leavings, no water
but only flat concrete parking lots
house tops, rows of lights,
some flicking on and off,
car tops, flat roofs, sloped roofs, angled roofs
no place to land, so they stay
they stay where they can stay no longer
like tired moths beating their wings
against the memory of a flame at a dead light bulb,
they cannot land, they can't come to rest
and my daughter has seen them
as an apparition, a sighting, a seeing.
We saw the geese again this early fall morning
and she says
"See they're flying in that shape!
See that dad!"
I read somewhere once about the mechanics of the vee,
how the lead goose takes the brunt of the wind
works hardest in cutting a hole into the air
the others magically pass through,
flies in this position for a while
maybe 15 or 20 minutes
then drops back and another
takes over so the other geese work less
but still get to come along,
that eventually perhaps several others will take the lead.
I tell her all this stuff
and she listens politely as she always does
she knows I tend to ramble
and then I start to tell her about the bison
in the snow storms but she changes the subject
gently guiding me like the lead goose.
Just before we turned off the hiway
towards the school building where I took her
so that some other members of our species might lead her
I remembered a moment some years ago
as I drove across the sand hills of Western Nebraska
but I didn't tell her.
She was already talking about something else
some little girl topic, her curiosity about the geese
fulfilled miles ago by my earnest bombast
but I was stuck on migration
and I thought of that rain swept afternoon
in my UPS package car
as I whipped across the ageful Sand hills--
these dunes of sand
stopped in mid-storm, mid-sentence almost,
when I saw the pelicans with their gangly necks
pursuing their strange preoccupation with being birds
when they obviously have not been designed for it
with rain slicker beaks and driftwood-chunk shaped bodies.
I slowed down my brown van
almost to a stop and somewhere the dust
I had disarranged in my haste in passing fell behind me
into a neat pattern onto the blacktop.
I watched as the pelicans flew.
Their flight as a flock one continuous integrated movement--
the lead pelican pumps its wings three times,
rises to a peak,
the tip of a swell,
then does not pump,
slowly drops down.
The one behind the leader pumps
three times,
rises up to the peak,
then slowly drifts down.
This motion repeated
the length of the flock
so that you will witness pelicans' flight
as a stunning wave-like motion,
each bird so ungainly
that when you think exactly
there is no hope,
the bird must crash down
it can't possibly pull itself out of this one,
it pumps its wings again to follow up the wave
made by the one in front of it,
each bird
rolling up to the crest
and down through the trough
of this sacred living together on earth.
