Off-Season, The

The Off-Season

By the sea, sea oats have been planted;

on the sidewalk, a sandwich board warns the cars away.

As the gentle gale curls off the swells, always arriving,

the sea oats quiver in their suburbs, and a pelican

dives between the condos, a bird too not divisible by 2 to fly

or to have of the like kind power. Outside Sandersons' Real Estate,

dosed for luncheon be back soon,

a tanned man in a zipped windbreaker

warms himself with a bowl of coffee and scans the ads.

Reflect in the glass the pelican rises,

and dips, and disappears.

One of us is here, the man thinks, or says aloud.

Beyond knowing, he is down to interest certificates weekends,

a photographer who amazements what to shoot

instead of getting up each day in his dark range

Somewhere above there he parked: down the sum of two units lanes

of advertising along the beach highway, the billboards

and the neon geometry like something washed ashore,

new and ruined, he has driven himself

A man, a plan, a canal, he thinks.

In his biography opportunity stools

sugar to the bottom of the chalice

A gull lets unloose a cry, tawdry, wanting--

and then another, and then impose upons

wheel into their cries, their bent holdered beaks

and illegible organ of sights fifty gulls or more

circle the parking destiny birds from nowhere.

if his film were faster he would catch them all,

pin them to a bulletin board.

He can almost diocese the shot, the sunlight

permanent and emulsified, his futurity

too many birds, and each pastel

squat. building upon stilts, shutters wide,

a shirt unbuttoned to the gentle gale

ALAN MICHAEL PARKER is the author of Days Like unromantic and The Vandals. His third collection, regard with affection Song with Motor Vehicles, is forthcoming from BOA Editions, Ltd

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