Late at night, in the rain

I drove to the end of the quay,

past the frosted lights of the refinery,

its single outlet flame

streaming in the wind like a pennant.

Between the hulking dark of the shipbuilders

and a car-park jungle of dillweed

was a wide curved verge, seamless with the road.

It was there that I found them:

the seagulls – the secret

of where they go at night.

Like snowfall on the road,

a tight-hooked rug of white fleece nubs:

no road, no verge, only birds.
I drove at them. The carpet rose, as if shaken out

by a mighty hand, peeled up and off the ground

and dispersed, shredded, in the rain,

in the instant of discovery

already swept away,

just as the impulse that had woken me,

angry, from a dream of my mother, and sent me

to the car, to drive the docks at night

was already gone.
I parked at the edge of the quay,

at the crest of a bluestone wall

holding back the leaping bay.

The light of the city lay in sheets

on the face of the rain. And then,

above the rude

maracas of water on the roof

came the delicate thud and shuffle

of countless seagulls settling on the car.