Gravel and Hawk: Poems

Report

30 Report Out hunting arrowheads, drawn by the smell, I walked to the edge of a wide depression and found a days-old cache of slaughtered owls. Their eyes gazed past into the canopy as masked with a kerchief I waded in, stooped, shooing flies, and counted fifty-three eastern screech owls: a stare of juveniles. Handling the bodies, I felt lodged in breasts like gravel stones the birdshot’s hard kernels. I knew what this was—not too hard to guess. Some group of hunters, three or four of them drunk on luck and guns, stumbled on the roost and couldn’t resist. They could not behave or think to stop until it was too late. I knelt among the dead in their open grave— embossed heads serifed with small ear tufts, square compact bodies, pronged and scabbarded feet. Now just a feather mattress, beyond care. And then the aftermath: alone, in woods fringed with the song of their distant cousins, I inherited a space to pile these words. ...