Between two palm trees thick with starlings
the horizon flattens the waves
beneath the sea’s heavy rag.
Here before we were, the ocean runs downhill
from the perpendicular of one trunk to its partner.
Like me, the rough exterior keeping balloons
and children off with a thorny I-told-you-so.
Raffia fronds hang from the crowns
exhausted with salt and the natural way of age.
Who was here first, the apple or the cactus?
asks the non-stop chatter of the starlings.
Those roughed-up trunks frame only the view,
not a way of living in this world,
subsistence requires something more.
The direction of the swell
poised in anticipation of a photograph
aren’t they same waves as yesterday?
One of these days the sea will kick a goal,
where the water in its never-ceasing movement,
examines, up close and personal, the new status quo.
Gulls will confuse themselves with pigeons
and why not? It’s all confusing. Are those bananas
or sausages? That cold hand of death.
Unripe dates hang competing with the street lights,
orange and testicular like the ganglions
of pendulum clocks, still carrying on
an hour behind the dwindling sun.
We’ve lived here for many a year.
The view between the palm trees still
thick with starlings and their parasites,
they’ll not put up much resistance
and who else will remember them?
Mark O’Flynn’s most recent collection of poems is Shared Breath (Hope Street Press, 2017). His latest novel The Last Days of Ava Langdon (2016) was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.