My Mother-in-Law Talks to Seagulls

Mother says there are ledges full of gold just off shore, that there are rafts of teakwood, loaded with jade, floating around between sea lanes. She says that when two ocean currents meet no ship can sail there, that death and birth are hard to tell apart in the sea off-shore

Each noon she shares a sandwich with seagulls on the lawn; she tells them of New Mexico, of saline flats where ancient arrowheads litter the cracking earth like shells on a beach, of Indian dances and cotton crops and moonlight through tall ash trees arched across the irrigation ditches. The seagulls nod and walk about and recall the albatross who couldn't fly, or the whale who smiled or some of the milder mysteries of the depths and shallows of mid-sea.

Mother says that stranger things than phosphorescence happen in the wake of ships, that greater treasures than small schools of silver smelt are found in the eddies around the pilings of a pier, that in the scruff of foam about each breaking wave pearls are born.