Magnolia Shoals

Up here among the gull cries
    we stroll through a maze of pale
red-mottled relics, shells, claws

as if it were summer still.
    That season has turned its back.
Though the green sea gardens stall,

bow, and recover their look
    of the imperishable
gardens in an antique book

or tapestries on a wall,
    leaves behind us warp and lapse.
The late month withers, as well.

Below us a white gull keeps
    the weed-slicked shelf for his own,
hustles other gulls off. Crabs

rove over his field of stone;
    mussels cluster blue as grapes:
his beak brings the harvest in.

The watercolorist grips
    his brush in the stringent air.
The horizon's bare of ships,

the beach and rocks are bare.
    He paints a blizzard of gulls,
wings drumming in the winter.
                                  October 1959
Sylvia Plath