Breakfast with Thom Gunn

Aubade

Those who lack a talent for love have come

to walk the long Pier 7. Here at the end

of the imagined world are three low-flying gulls

like lies on the surface; the slow red

of a pilot’s boat; the groan

of a fisherman hacking a small shark—

and our speech like the icy water, a poor

translation that will not carry us across.

What brought us west, anyway? A hunger.

But ours is no Donner Party, we who feed

only on scenery, the safest form

of obfuscation: see how the bay is a gray

deepen...