Canned Gulls

I'm trapped inside, it's just a recording
- this gift from my sister last Christmas
a small white contraption plugged
into an electrical socket fills my living
room with the sudden sound of surf
breaking onto shore to a background
squawk of canned gulls.

I wonder who stalked that beach
held shell to ear for Wal-Mart.
It’s strange, all of this - snow
in heaps outside my window
grim dark below the evergreen
wood-smoke rising from brick chimneys
and still this ceaseless white noise

of wave after wave to remind me
I really don’t belong here.