Today above the gull's call
I hear you waking me again
to see that bird, flying
so strangely over the city,
not wanting
to stop, wanting
the blue waste of the sea--
Now it skirts the suburb,
the noon light violent against it:
I feel its hunger
as your hand inside me,
a cry
so common, unmusical--
Ours were not
different. They rose
from the unexhausted
need of the body
fixing a wish to return:
the ashen drawn, our clothes
not sorted for departure.