Falcon

There is a falcon that watches over a line on my commute. I have seen it before, but this winter, its tawny, ruched feathers and stern, bowed head against the muffled blue cotton sky loosed something inside of me. It sits on a telephone wire that I like to imagine connects the two farm houses to each other, and stares into the chaff that covers the ground like an ozone layer. I wonder which small creation it will explicate.

This week when I saw it, I began to think about how fierce its life was. How studied, focused, intense. How brutal with the catch in its talons. And it hit me. I’m the falcon.

I am that solitary, stern-looking thing, bearing down my head with intensity to search for something, any small thing to abduct from the mundane. And when I have, I tear it apart, bones and sinew, particles of God, to isolate and make a metaphor of every single angle. I can make a mess out of a mouse.

And falcons can be trained to come back again and again and again. To land on the same brawny arm. The somber routine. Literature is full of falconry imagery: Shakespeake to Yeats to the Bible, falconry is used to represent trouble, captivity, oppression. As am I captive to feeling everything to its fullest.

But, a falcon itself, without the falconer, is symbolic of freedom, light, aspiration. And there is this, which, amazingly, lives on my dresser in a pile of other verses:
We have escaped like a bird from the fowler’s snare; the snare has been broken, and we have escaped. Psalm 124:7

It is not all somber and gritty and terrible to be the falcon. I like my observant view from the telephone wire. Sometimes I apologize to the vermin, but sometimes I enjoy the sport. Only when I keep a watchful, interrogating eye on all of life and pull apart what it could possibly mean or illustrate, do I end up with a poem. If I can learn to be that loosed falcon, if I can keep the intense appetite for life and still choose where I live and land, then maybe I can be free in my own air.

Most days, freedom is a poem. Here are a few leftovers from my year.

Forecast

I sprained my right wrist
at eighteen
took a final exam
with my left hand

Before it snows
I hurt
the intricate joint swells
into a Doppler radar pain

This is how it is with you
I made the overripe peaches
into cobbler, to feel
good about myself

Every Advent I open
the cabinets down
my back, a swollen spine
to tell of you

I sleep on my side, then
a coastline with no country
a place that eats my joints
a place that will not snow

Lost in Translation

He reads me
like a book which has been translated
so the words are not the same,
the meaning not as it was
when God wrote my life thesis
with a majestic finger
onto my sternum,
like with Moses and the tablets.

What says, in eternal language,
a handful of lavender thrown
to scatter loveliness across the world,
becomes, in his eyes, read right to left,
a bullet of possibility, to pierce
the air with her quiet, wild mind.

Each morning I wake
I must choose between two selves—
to walk my gardens whispering prayers
of peace, or to pick up my weapon
and conquer the earth, under a blessing
I have not yet learned how to say,
one in a language so haunting
it covers me like the Holy Ghost.

And then
the large, flat hand of love
pressed to my forehead
to check if sickness still fired there
like a gardener’s hand
to paver slate, sun-warm
to richly calloused fingers
dirt-caked halos around each nail bed
                and the whole space
smelling of sun and clay
bulbous tomatoes’ drunken languor
waiting to be chosen, held
devoured with coarse salt
or perhaps even a slice of bread,
bread so new it is still rising
a sun salutation for its own being.

The Last Time

We sat across from each other
contestants on a game show
table wrapped in brown paper
a large, flat present
under the canopy of our branches

We waited
            for alcohol and primitive food
to come on shells with sauces
to help us feel
it slide down our throats
Suez, Erie Canal

I wasted time
writing on the table paper
lines borrowed off the tongues
of Frost, Hirschfield, Oliver
which you read upside down
as usual

When we left
I saw the busboy on his knees
reading the tabletop
trying to understand
how to clean up our mess.

And at the end of it
after all of the praying
going hungry and feasting
down to the bones and sinew
there was a large, silent peace
full of nothing but light

no desperation or inequality
but a perfect wholeness
like the way Jesus’ hands
must have looked
not before, but after.