Gulls Aloft, by Herschel
I brace my gaze
Against a stone-blue sky
And strain to scry
Three corpuscles of white
Unraveling knots of flight
Lifting in liquid rays.
I cannot turn away.
To lose them from my sight--
So far the fall...
So spare the air...
How soft life lies.
*********
I wrote the above after a visual experience one summer day when I happened to be skygazing and spotted three seagulls way up at the extreme limits of my vision. First one, then two, after a while three of them. I could not 'see' that they were seagulls, because what I saw were the tiniest little points of white in an infinitely deep blue liquid medium which we call 'sky', but the motion of the dots enabled the inference that they were seagulls, whirling in an updraft over our big river. I watched them for a long time, drifting in and out of perception, only intermittently appearing as a trio.
It really took great effort of concentration to keep an eye on them. If I let my eyes wander away looking for possible others, it took considerable effort to spot one of them again, and only after spotting one of them was it possible to spot the second or occasionally the third.
For all I know there may have been a few more, constituting a small flock, but for the length of time that I studied them, and knowing their tendency to flock together, I think I was able to count all that were there to be counted.
If you go fishing out in a boat, you will occasionally spot an upwelling of fish on the surface when they're driven up by predators picking off members of the school from below. Fisherfolk call this a blitz. The school of baitfish all try to escape the predators, but they school by instinct, knowing their safety is in numbers, and it's the poor fishies on the bottom of the school who get taken.
Once a school of baitfish has been driven to the surface, it's amazing how rapidly the sky fills with a flock of gulls, which have spotted the splashing from wherever they were patrolling, easily from a distance of a few miles and an altitude of hundreds of feet.
So gulls, as with other raptors, when they are looking for food, will soar to a height that enables them to scan the largest area of possible interest. When food is spotted, they converge rapidly from all over, and dozens of them can show up in just seconds, materializing out of what may seem to humans like an empty sky.
I called them 'corpuscles' because that seemed to be the word for the smallest unit of organic life discernible to the naked eye.
'I could not turn away' because once I located them, if I had dropped my gaze, it was highly unlikely I'd be able to find them again, even knowing the general direction of where to search.
'So far the fall' was a conflation of the life and death aspects of what I was seeing, losing them from my sight being the end of my visual experience, as death by predation is the end of life for the prey.
'So soft life lies' was a reference to how tenuous life is in nature, when a slender two-inch minnow is in constant peril of being spotted from a mile away by a bird in the sky.
Everything living thing needs energy to go on living. Animal life, including humans, really does hang by the thinnest of threads. While we are alive, while we are observing other life, we tend to focus on the durability of life. I have been amazed at times, watching something die, how living organisms cling to life, how hard it is to die when you are suffering and would maybe like your life to be over.
The quantity of living organisms devoured every day by predators higher up in the food chain is of course enormous beyond our power of conception. And when I speak of the food chain, that includes both giant mammals--lions, tigers, grizzly bears--but also microscopic viruses that can kill a host in a few short days when they get the chance. So the chain of predation has no end either up or down, it is continuous, endless in both directions.
All these thoughts streamed through my mind as I reflected on my experience. I had an intimation of the same line of thought from William Blake:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove house fill'd with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell thro' all its regions.
I had fun writing this post. I see once again that composing poetry is essentially a kind of mental masturbation. What better forum for this kind of thing than KB? Although the pleasure of masturbation is intensely personal, sometimes it can be interesting to watch.