AVIARY - bruce walsh


Gulls are mating. Last week I watched two starlings build a nest in an eave and I applauded the effort. But the gulls, I don’t know; no courtship, no shared experience, no fidelity.

I want to pass on a healthy distrust of people to you. I want you to know isolation. But solitude sounds nothing like a gift. And we are not one another. I do not have your social graces. You say I dislike people but I disagree. It is something else. If I pass it on to you maybe you could name it.

Little happens without a certain amount of abandon. There is a dent in my desk from a chair I upended in an argument. If some things do not matter then let the gulls fuck across every shingled peak, let the ex-lovers quarrel. But I am unconvinced.
               
I have seen the shape of you in someone’s arms. No, I have seen you fold to a stranger’s touch. You are in the highest boughs with a song and the wildest sways of the breeze. I am in the underbrush, turning over damp brown leaves, convinced of some dark thing’s existence. 




Bruce Walsh
The Sense of an Ending
Julian Barnes