Translating the Hawk, and: The Difficulties of the Fire Escape

Translating the Hawk

For three days, the hawk perches on our roof's peak, at the west end where it overlooks my wife and me on our deck, from where it can swoop down and reach us with its claws and beak before we leave our chairs. Each day is hours of absence ended by flight we follow because we sit outside and wait as if the sky were television, the hawk a program filmed exclusively for us. We feel changed beneath it, August curling shut, brittle with heat. We celebrate the guest we do not speak to, whatever it sees in us staying secret as death. And though we cannot name it, narrowing by color and size, we believe it a male who returns because we wait, the hawk on the house a yoke of used time we gladly shoulder, the hawk making us rise before dawn, our doors left open all night because we want our emerging to be silent, just the screen's soft shuffle outward and back, the hawk, three times, exactly where we left him, his evenings a story he will tell us when we learn to translate the silence the way we have learned to interpret God, what he might be saying from another world which can only be reached through flight.

The Difficulties of the Fire Escape

That in the beginning they were ladders.That thousands, once, had balconies made of wood.That those made of iron would rust to collapse.That the railings grew hot enough to burn.That the steep steps were narrow and slick.That people stored trash on the balconies. That they crowded them with flowers.That they led into courtyards without exits.That they traveled down air shafts that were chimneys.That they were aesthetically displeasing.That they lowered property values.That they reminded tenants of disaster.That the buildings soared to a thousand steps.That the tenants, now, were terrified of outside descent.That those skyscrapers were filled with sprinklers.That they were flammable.That such heights were impossible to defend,And therefore, like gods, they were deemed immortal.