The Ibis Grove

Riverside, six Monterey cypresses
rise from a garden, their wolf-ear tufts thatching
a tenement of branches. Each evening,
ibis fly in: as they settle, an opera of
hooked rasps and drawn-out croaks till night comes down.
From the pier I watch an estuary
flat as a tarn but for the poetry of
surface tension embossing a white sky,
the drowned green tower reaching towards me.
Beneath it, later, the coming dusk
already inside that creepered cavern,
I hear the wind-crack and jarred groan of a ship
tacking beneath clouds the stained white of
ibis plumage, miming their dusty cries.