Just sitting here on the balcony, overlooking Long Bay, Antigua. Everything here is beautiful, of course, from the ocean-going catamarans that skim across the horizon to the little yellow breasted birds that alight on the table next to you as you sit by the pool, reading.
I’m particularly taken with the pelicans, who go about their daily business just feet from our balcony. Catching fish isn’t easy. They work hard at it, dawn to dusk, wheeling, scanning, diving into the sea, maybe they got one, just as likely not, but either way back into the air to do it again, and again, just another day in the office.
I could watch them all day. As a large and ungainly terrestrial biped, it’s hard to look at them without feeling inelegant – clunky, really. You wonder why nature even bothered with all those other evolutionary experiments, like the ones that ended up with me here sitting on my big old glutes, when it had already perfected animals that couldn’t go about their regular chores without writing visual poetry. Maybe it was just that there couldn’t really be anything wonderful, if there wasn’t going to be anybody earthbound looking up, transfixed in wonder.
the needlefish 