Take in Life
.
There where the breaking waves
are thin and seep into the sand
and nudge the dregs and driftwood
grudgingly back to land
(as most things in the end return),
I walked alone along the beach
to comb my take on life
at the water’s farthest reach.
And then on up a ways
I saw what seemed to be
a gray-and-white forgotten rag
washed up and wrung out by the sea.

Closer up and looking down, I shuddered
at a gull whose lifeless wings beside
moved only with the foam.
Cocked high his head, bill open wide,
as if to laugh and take in life
and celebrate the trout
he'd swooped and nabbed and gulped
headlong*... until he figured out
his catch indeed was caught,
but in a way he hadn’t figured in.
There, beyond his gaping jaw,
still flapping was the fin.

His open eyes looked horrified
and left no doubt he knew
that sometimes what we take in life
is more than we can chew.
© TRK Patterns of Ink, Copyright, 2007
.
Yesterday was a sweltering 90 degrees as my youngest daughter and I worked outside. when we were done we closed the four-mile gap between us and one of the beautiful beaches along Michigan's West Coast.) The water was refreshing. Coming in and lying on the towel, I remembered the opening lines of that Destin post in May and these older thoughts from a walk on a different beach long ago.

In the summer of 1981, I strolled past the north end of Lighthouse Park in Port Huron and came upon a dead seagull with an eight-inch trout lodged in its throat. I didn't take a picture but never forgot the image and obvious untold story.

At first glance the poem's title suggests "feel good" thoughts about enjoying life to the fullest, and it is about enjoying life from the perspective that as we "take in" life we must be careful what we take in. The poem is new but it's based on a journal entry from the 80's entitled: "Things I've Learned from Dead Birds." Catchy, huh?

There were two other lessons: one about hundreds of dead starlings my family saw along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. They'd been surprised by a late spring snow and couldn't fly as fast and as high as usual. We winced each time one hit our windshield. For miles and miles, all the cars kept hitting them until we lost count of how many we saw. The other lesson was about a bird I saw stuck inside a pipe.

I was painting a clothes-line pole and saw a sparrow inside the narrower cross pipe. He'd had gone in headfirst easily enough and inched along until he came to the first of four eye-bolts that went through the pipe (to which the lines were tied). The bolt blocked his way, but the same feathers that glided smoothly forward would not let him go backwards against their grain. There was no way to turn around. Who knows how long he lived like that, staring at the small round light at the far end of the pipe until his eyes blinked their last.

Sorry if this post seems a bit macabre [which means "dance of death"], but we can learn from all three plights. Sometimes our circumstances are beyond our control—like a late spring snow, but often we're to blame for biting off more than we can chew or not avoiding the places we shouldn’t go that keep us longer than we wished to stay.

Note: For those interested in words and how they mean, in the poem's first "take" {line 7]
take is a noun [i.e. "perspective"]; in the second, in is an adverb modifying take (life being the object of the verb); and in the third, in is a preposition [i.e. “in life” modifying the verb] rendering a different meaning. I wasn't sure about keeping the last four lines because they limit the poem's meaning to my conclusion, I'll keep them for now. *HEADLONG means both "headfirst" and "without adequate thought ": RECKLESSLY