At Wachusett, the lake darker
through winter straight pines,
rocks dumped in the ice sheet,
we stood for a bird’s high
hovering over the inlets: red hawk
like none the books mention
circled and lazed on the air’s
updrift over his watching hold
down the cone of his vision
of stone and valley tight to his eye
that fed on a wide space of small
movement he’s triggered by: snake,
rabbit: liquid shutting the lens
pinpricked down to his dive –
everything in him going in one
feather spread downflight first
on the fur-stripping claws
second his bone-splitting beak.
I should shudder, remembering
victims I’ve known, times
I’ve been killer, harbour gull
snapping off crabs’ legs;
other times I was running
home through the evening, then
hunched by that knived
falling out of the light.
That day we were watching, part
of his landscape, a claw’s length
out from the wars of ferrets
and eagles, land grabs, horse thefts,
slavings and sack of our separate
but he circled. And rose
in a spiral upward into the blue
shock of the sky diving
somehow upward and vanished.