In dawn’s wing-lift, when great gulls
tell time, he let go her hand. She
counted syllables rounding up silence.
.
Onto the damp, fashionable driveway,
slabs of it powdered by salt, she heard
a gull drop a noisy quahog for openers.
.
Feathers filled her mind, flight elements,
a warm thermal climbed upon, migrations.
Now all my birds are flying, she said.
.
A last time she held him, his bones fled,
heart at smithereens, never looking back.
He was an auk, open mouthed, pleading
.
for forgiveness, the cold take of muscle
racing far ahead of lungs’ last exercise,
nerves at plastic wire ventures, the fire-
.
place of his chest banked in ashes.
Overhead, in trails of blue flight,
the company of birds climbed outward.
.
He rose to the east of morning, left her
and Nahant touching an edge of departures,
fingerprints carried aloft on feathers,
.
and all the way out, like broken promises,
the sea morgue-cold and valid,
she felt him newly forming over waters.
.
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tongues of the ocean 