Gravel and Hawk: Poems

Hawk

25 Hawk Lost in the woods with an air rifle, a boy supposed to be after birds, amazed by vines and wintering trees, resigned, I fired my chambered pellet into limbs to ricochet in air and a red-tail lifted off its perch, rose in dreamlike silence, muscled breast angling up, flexing, as my neck craned to track it straight overhead. Its sharp hooked beak, assassin’s eye; laboring with clear purpose to work the bellows it carved a groove into the ceiling. The grown-ups found me late that evening asleep in a junked hay truck, the gun months later, near where I saw the hawk, rust-lichened, aslant against an oak. ...