The Pelican Feeder

Squid-ink sky, so the birds come in: Larry and Curly and split-beaked Moe. Larry he saved from a propeller’s blade,

Curly was hooked in a fisherman’s catch, the silver tips tearing his rubbery throat, opening it like a gardening glove.

Nobody knows what happened to Moe: a jet-ski’s figure-eight or the careless gaff from a zealous owner of undersized Muddies.

They’re not his children, both down South as far from the reach of his belated atonement as a continental shelf will allow.

Nor are they the needy reincarnations of his long dead parents, safely under dirt. Each is an obligation he distrusts.

When the wind blows in like the hair of a dog and the clouds white the water into foam, the pelicans come in to take fish from his hand, angling closer on oblique arcs, cutting rough ripples to the tepid foreshore, peddling past the heron’s wry gatekeeping, rocking and rolling like mariners who’ve been weeks at sea. First Larry, then Curly, then sidelong Moe, still as suspicious as the day he was found.

He cuts up the pilchards and keeps them on ice in the wide laundry sink, the blood slushing around the snub heads of lever-lid homebrew.

They’ll take the fillets cautiously, snatching them down, their grave eyes unblinking and honest. Over time they’ve come closer, he’s nearly been domesticated. They have almost discharged their duty – a life for a life. A few more handfuls of fish. A few more storms to clear the nets from his head.