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Rays at Cape Hatteras
The cownose rays are showing off today.
They flip themselves like flapjacks in hot pans
of Carolina surf, and when one lands
the splat reverberates a mile away.
Sometimes you see the backs of their whale-gray
pectoral fins, outstretched like flipper-hands;
or else they show their bellies as they dance,
white slabs with grins carved out, as if from clay.
In great outlays of energy, they burst
through breakers, moved by some instinctive wish
to flounder in the air. Their flight is brief
and clumsy, evolution having cursed
these would-be herons with the flesh of fish:
rude fliers in the face of disbelief.
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[center]<table bgcolor=white cellpadding=25 border=0><tr><td>This poem begins with such a perfectly apt image--the rays "flipping themselves like flapjacks"--that the reader is drawn into the experience at once, and then not disappointed by the highly visual stanza he walks into, right down to the "grins carved out, as if from clay." What a playful view of living things! And how apt to end with the biblical stuff of creation that links us to the ray.
The sestet is another kind of delight--auditory. It picks up the "clay" sound and repeats it in two words, and then goes on to an orgy of alliteration that continues the playfulness, down to that wonderful ending full of Fs, ''showing off," like the ray/flapjacks. Glorious ending!
~Rhina
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