Rituals

One on One

A sudden rush from above and then a flurryof feathers as the two came together in mid-air,clashed, and fell to the dirt, whirlwinding it.Then he, the hunter, roosted on his helpless prey.

I was not twenty feet away, up on a ladder to fillthe feeder. We all three froze. The hawk staredhard at me as he flexed his talons in the robin’s back.Beneath him the dying bird lifted its broken neck

slightly with each last breath. The hawk held tight,squeezing tighter and harder until there was the finalcollapse of this small ceremony. His wide eyes hadheld mine through the whole ordeal. It was as if

he wanted me not only to see, to witness, but to attest.And then it had finished. He made a final clasp,and took his trophy and, in one beautiful maneuver,lifted with the dead one and flew off into oblivion.

Homage to Wallace Stevens’s Interior Paramour

Was it in Oslo or Copenhagen that we firstfound favor for the earliest candle of the evening,first of all of those that were later to be lighted,

in sequence, round and around the rooms where wesat thinking our thoughts and sharing them with othersin the faint light that faded to full dark in the corners

of those cold rooms, that winter away, far furthernorth than we had been before? The warmed wineand the dimmed light, as we accustomed ourselves

to them, as we thought our thoughts or spoke themopenly, seemed to adjust to the temper of our minds,to add something almost palpable to the conversation.

And when someone, reminding all of us of you,quietly said, “Yes, God and the imagination are one,”we took our time to think that through all over again.

And then, at last, there was only the silence and the slowlyguttering candles. And then a second serving of winewas silently delivered, with cheese and assorted crackers.

A Winter Afternoon

It is as ordinary as a bowl of flowersset in the exact center of a tableused for other things, for food and

conversation, or the simple sittingwith a book in one’s hand or a glassof wine, with evening coming on

along the horizon, through the barrentrees, flashing in the glass, causingit to shimmer with such struck light

that it continues to tingle in the air,in the mind, long after any revelationhas dissipated in the growing gloom

of that late winter afternoon, whenyou sat alone with long thoughts.

A Winter Remembered

This winter I remember the weatherthat took you in, an icy rain, a lidof fog on the tops of the trees. We

drove the long miles out of the city,into the open country, passing patchesof snow on the hillsides shielded

from the sun and littering the low placesnear the road where it wristed aroundtilted fence posts, the barren trees,

moving further out through long lanesof silence, to the place at the top of the hill,where we stopped. Too many of us

had been hunched in the hearse, somefacing backwards. We watched fromthe windows, draining with an icy rain,

and hardly spoke. Then, when we finallyarrived, everything was already ready.Several men stood a short distance

off, under a large oak, leaning hardon their shovels, anxious for us to leave,to let them finish what they’d begun.

We watched and listened to what wassaid, and nodded to the others whonodded to us, and then moved slowly

away, reentered the cars and were gone.Although we put your body in the earththat day—many years ago now—

even then we knew that your spirit,so quickly lost to us, was still outthere somewhere in the cold icy air.