Concepts of Love // Seagulls

Running on the beach today I came across a bunch of seagulls all lined up just at the shore and slowed to move around them and observe, ocean facing reeds behind me counted seagulls, I think one hundred, one hundred and ten, stopped in the same spot, they were all pointed in the same direction, like boats, but on the sand. A few stragglers in the back floated past the tide line and submerged, as if it's no different for them to swim or stand. Have you watched a seagull entering the water from the land? A spotted bird at the edge of the mass of them turned to watch the water and skittered forward until its feet were covered wet and proudly bore the crest of a wave, facing into it, but as the water rescinded it staggered backward, betraying its levity, like an unsuspecting child, not a seasoned bird salt, was left forward toward the water, dry and standing, and bore again, again, until the floating bird receded with the wave into the sound, into the sea between the island and the continent. It was the kind of North Shore night with no Connecticut. The sky what you reported of the Vinalhaven coastline out your sunset kitchen window, smoky amber, dolphin skin. As the backdrop to this massive seagull conference, the horizon of the planet.

The waves were seasick eating up the shore with the cyclic chromatosis of the real. Their underbellies seemed unnatural worldly, more a patent  L.L. Bean leather moccasin kind of green. A girl walked up the beach and startled me. The skyish pink turned purple and the sand now purple grey, it was getting late, I walked away. I guessed she was sixteen, because the way she appeared aimlessly from the parking lot, no dog, no running shoes, I imagined her as me sixteen getting high at the beach with my friends, imagined I'd once straggled along old Centerport beach in the tracks of my future self, who recognized me as I could never her. Looking back, the beach now flat, compressed. It was the palette of face, person face, the sea skin pink with white lace fringe, the sand and sky skin too. The landscape would have lost its flattened evanescence, less the relatively dimensional girl juxtaposed against it.

Sometimes when I'm running I about-face to examine a piece of scenery, as just then, when I passed a fish skeleton bigger than I'd ever seen! Only face and a dozen vertebrae. When I find horseshoe crab corpses I like to swing them around by the tail, standing talking in my head, educating an imaginary companion about how horseshoe crab tails work. Nearing the inlet where the water makes a corner and the beach abruptly ends, the receding beach-house foreground shrank away, revealing the abandoned nuclear power plant on the other side of the inlet, a dismal fortress, with chainlink before it, and the setting sun behind it. Its audacious paint becomes a reticent shade of shadowy teal when the opposite side is refulgent.

A mile of open marsh away, two white dormer windows called across the sky my very bedroom, reaching from the other side of murky paths through deadened reeds, past the osprey nest the Nature Conservancy built. At high tide, the road that goes from the power plant along the marsh to my house is a thin peninsula and reminds me of Vinalhaven, when I'm running it reflecting I should tell you that the sky, reflected in the sand, was smokey amber in some places, blue grey like dolphin skin elsewhere. Along the road, nautical rope and twine lined with punctured buoys separate tracts of marsh labeled NO PARKING. There are solar panels, dodging with not skill but luck the rotted siding peeling off the house next door, a hand-painted mailbox, a ten-year-old Land Rover with its markings transposed to read RAN OVER.

It takes much less time to run on the road than on the beach because it is firm under my feet and because there are fewer distractions, the scenery is perfunctory, the puddles are road colored. On the corner is the French restaurant that brings limos past my house. No one else drives past but high beach teenagers, and couples taking photos to announce weddings in the Hamptons community journal. The staff at the restaurant where I work is in conflict with the staff at the fancy French place, because on weekend nights, after their shifts are over, they call to order take-out right before our kitchen closes, screwing us into staying late for one illegitimate non-tipping table eating from take-out containers. I pulled the scarf over my face down from my nose, to rub my runny nose against the scarf, and smelled restaurant.

Along the edge of my cracked gravel street the plant life is plant death. Vines reach from the ground into a mess all rolled around itself around the power lines, like when I backrolled a round hairbrush intractably into my long hair, blond un-dyed then, like when I have more than one spool of thread in my bag, like when I unpack in Vinalhaven and find a pile of jewelry wound, dead vines around the power lines. Fields surround my house of bald phragmites blown and broken, nose to knees.

My bedroom is the kind of second story room that has a door to the outside. I'm sitting darkly typing on the flat part of the roof in the decline of neon hues. The star behind the power plant is screaming ceding to this screen the intrigue of a sun among black trees.