The hackberry tree, a static of twigs and branches
so densely woven sparrows went flitless there,
but hopped instead, stob to stob, and disappeared
like names, dates, and faces in an ordinary mind.
It was the bowl at the top I wanted to see for myself,
twig-sac of heft and weave, broad
as the hindquarters of a bull, nest of dozen
generations of eagle, heron, or hawk.
I had studied it for an hour and seen no sign of life
but saw a way up, beside the hackberry, up
the thigh-thick limbs of the yellow pine,
then out its long crooked pitch-dripping finger
pointing inside the snarl and bracing maybe
the nest itself. Even then I felt myself the fool I was,
in that deep green chapel climbing,
having lost the brightest light, seeing in every crotch of bark
a voodoo beautiful arrangement of rodents’ bones.
I found the limb and sat it well, like a horse,
and skidded my way outwards, seeing from under the canopy of needles
how this mount was swallowed in the hackberry’s thatch,
how the limbs of one had grown inside the other, until
on the last yard or less I was back in the open, half-blind
and wobbling to my feet, letting my bare, tacky hands ascend
the nest’s outer wall. A single foot shy of the lip,
I placed my ear to it, a body of ribs. There was no heart
to be heard beneath the wind blowing by,
though by and by, my eyes at last unblinking, I saw
how just above my cheek a rabbit’s skull swayed
in a thong of its own delicate leather, how the last round mound
between my hair and the nest’s open maw
was a Joseph’s coat of hide and hair. Slowly,
I stalked, lifted my right leg
and nestled it in among the tight-woven branches.
And there was nothing there but my arms, elbows locked
among the stobs and hoisting me up and up, nothing
until the horned owl came out flying,
leaping, hooked beak wide and blue-gray tongue protruding,
a mother-noise a million years old
that even as I fell, screeching myself, I kept on hearing.
It was her talon that tore the palm of my hand,
or a bone or a branch, it was something I held that held
me back, or seemed to as I fell, my legs
by the miracle of it swinging beneath me again,
so that I landed belly-down across the same pitchy branch
I’d entered on, then slung myself sloth-like from it
and dangled there, my eyes twisted shut,
my heart making wing-beat bird after bird,
my breath a mix of man’s gasp and rabbit bleat.
And this is why my life and heart lines are joined inside my fist,
a kind of canal of the flesh, a path from knowing to faith.
This is why I have crawled along the thoroughfares of snakes
with a bedsheet, looking to rescue a broken-winged owl.
Therefore, when a grass fire swept toward it, I ran
to that same, swaybacked, fuel-dense hackberry tree
and pummeled it with stones and howled
until they rose—one, two, three, cat-faced and immense—
great horned owls aloft toward the going down sun.