Grand Isle Haibun
Wet from yesterday, the ground is unsure of its surface. The trail, sometimes clear between
the grasses, does not move forward. It is cold. The brown pelican’s grey feet are small
umbrellas turned outward by wind as the water laps, a thirsty mastiff, against the breakwall.
Two distant barges mirror our movement. We are toys on the floor of an open floor plan
that is too open and too flat. I am aware that my smallness is unlike the hummingbird’s
jeweled throat or a milligram of your antipsychotic. This calculation, accounting for the tare
weight of migration’s two billion beaks and a sampling of bands, does not make this place less
open, less flat. Just above my neck the low myrtle thicket twitches. I do not see the warbler
dart across the sky, the missing back of an earring dropped.
the slow slip of waves—
a blanket stolen in sleep
our bodies, the coast