This moonlit resaca, in breathless air,
Perfect mirror of heaven, broken only
By some deep night bird,
Skimming its beak across the surface,
By some evening planet,
Reduced in grade from star;
And by men who thought
To tame it all, wailing by
In am-
bu-
lance;
There lies that which is
Greater than you
And greater than me:
The mystery.

I wrote this poem sometime in the early Eighties, probably 1982. We were living at the La Hacienda Apartments which fronts on Boca Chica Boulevard but sits on a segment of the Old Town Resaca.

This was the first time I’d lived that close to water, if you don’t count the tiny creek that ran by the house my parents moved us to when I was in the second grade, and I spent quite a bit of time on the resacas bank, fishing sometimes, chatting with neighbors occasionally, but very often just in meditation.

Cormorants and their cousins were mysteriously ancient, with their toothy beaks and dinosaur faces, standing on branches with their wings spread in a ragged version of national birds hanging on a flag. I learned later that cormorants and their cousins, while water birds, do not produce the oils that keep a duck’s feathers essentially dry. So cormorants must have a period after a swim to dry their wings.

Much more mysteriously, though, one night when the wind was calm and the water dark, I saw a line appear on the surface of the water, catching the little bit of light from the yard lights behind some of the properties along the resaca, and draw itself quickly over a considerable length of the resaca. Then again a minute or so later. Then over and over again and again.

This was fascinating to me. What could cause this? I’d done some fishing in earlier days and had seen some very quick fish, but not this quick. Besides, a fish traversing just under the surface would be pushing a wave. Very mysterious.

The phenomenon repeated itself several nights in a row before, finally, I made out a shape flashing through the faint beams of light making their way through the shrubbery and trees along the banks: it seemed to be a bird of some sort.

During a prep period or lunch, I told some of my fellows at school what I’d seen and someone said it was probably a skimmer, which I’d never heard of. I’d been looking through a birding book we had—probably an Audubon—but hadn’t noticed skimmers yet. At home that evening, I looked them up.

A dark bird, about the size and shape of a medium size gull, a skimmer’s outstanding characteristic was that its lower mandible was longer than the upper, the only bird for which this was true. It would fly across the surface of the water with its lower beak dropped and cut through the surface, eventually hitting a fish of some sort that had the bad luck to be surface feeding in the skimmer’s path.

I never saw a skimmer around the resaca in the daylight, and I never saw more than one line being drawn at a time and the phenomenon was intermittent, leading me to suspect that there was only one bird inhabiting the area. But it was a tentative conclusion, very often the case in observed phenomena.

One very calm night, the moon was full and my skimmer friend was busy and the first couple of lines of the poem ran across my mind and became a secondary object of contemplation, repeating, adding lines, and repeating again. When an ambulance went by with its siren blaring and echoing through the neighborhood, it struck me as almost comic, contrasting the ancient animal ritual I was observing with the short-lived struggles we humans spend so much of our time trying to figure a way out of, and the thought was fairly complete. I went inside and wrote it down.