Hawk
[posted by Callimachus]
A hawk sailed over me today, right overhead, drifting west, somehow into the wind. I might have missed him but for the "chirrrr" he let go just then and made me look up (it was a red-tail, the sound the one they dub over the weak-throated bald eagle in the car commercials). White hawk-body against the blue. Hawks are Robinson Jeffers' birds, and as such seem to belong at the end of a long, scourging trail scrambled over boulders, in the last, wracked, fog-bound place on earth. But here was one cruising the hood. Fat hunting, no doubt. "Corruption never has been compulsory," Jeffers wrote; "when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains." But the poet knows what the hawk makes him think. The hawk knows where the small, tasty birds that migrate are gathering.
A hawk sailed over me today, right overhead, drifting west, somehow into the wind. I might have missed him but for the "chirrrr" he let go just then and made me look up (it was a red-tail, the sound the one they dub over the weak-throated bald eagle in the car commercials). White hawk-body against the blue. Hawks are Robinson Jeffers' birds, and as such seem to belong at the end of a long, scourging trail scrambled over boulders, in the last, wracked, fog-bound place on earth. But here was one cruising the hood. Fat hunting, no doubt. "Corruption never has been compulsory," Jeffers wrote; "when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains." But the poet knows what the hawk makes him think. The hawk knows where the small, tasty birds that migrate are gathering.
