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13 miles of bike ride Sunday
Through upscale suburbs and seedy refinery towns, past bemused cud-chewing livestock and weekend driveway car waxers, behind freeway sound walls and along the shore of San Pablo Bay. All of it colored by autumn, the scent of fennel and sun-baked live-oak mold, diesel exhaust and rain three days away, and a sharp-shinned spooked from its roost on a light pole.
And in the first mile, a road-killed red tail.
I have had Jeffers in my head since, replayed here below the fold.
Hurt Hawks
I
The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.
He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.
II
I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.
We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.
I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
[A hawk excerpt from one of ze ol’ unfinished books.]
Which parts of your novel are true?
Oh, come on. Ask me an interesting question.
But your readers want to know.
Fine. Tell them all the animal transformation stories are true. The rest, I made up.
If you could be any living creature on earth, in the water, and in the sky, which would you choose?
On earth; that’s hard. Jaguar. Bear. Snake. In the water, dolphin or whale, I think. But the air is easy. Hawk.
Why hawk?
It’s the way they fly: the coasting, the soaring, the plunge of the hunt, the riding of currents. And the story about them is that they’re messengers. When you see a hawk, it’s supposed to mean a message is coming to you.
What message?
Well, that’s your problem to figure out. Of course, where I live we have so many hawks—herons, too, and eagles from the sanctuary, kingfishers—but mainly hawks, that I have to wonder if they get time off to just fool around, or if they’re always expected to carry meaning.
Have you ever had a dream about a hawk?
No, when I fly in dreams I use my own body. But they have flown into my windows, more than once, and every single time, there was a death.
They signify death?
No, a bird of any kind flying into your window is supposed to signify death. I think the fact that I’ve seen hawks do it just means I was supposed to pay attention, get ready, for the crossing, you know? Or at least, that’s what I tried to do, in case it meant that.
Were the deaths literal or metaphoric?
Death is always literal.
By: By Theriomorph on 2007 10 09
Love it, Theriomorph. Thank you. When’s the book coming out?
Wren, I’d forgotten about the Robert Penn Warren. Wonderful stuff.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2007 10 09
Eric took the older kids into Monterey to swim while I stayed home with the cold-stricken eldest. Late in the evening, they returned, with a 9"x9"x9” box. They stopped along Rt. 68 when Eric spotted a bright red head on a small black body just off into the shoulder. He picked it up, figuring it was dead. Then it moved slightly. So he brought it to the car, put it the box and let the eldest keep an eye on it while shopping. By the time he got home, it had recovered enough to do serious damage to the sides of the box. We got out the cat carrier for the evening, to make sure it was truly, shockingly, unharmed. The next morning, we let it go, watched it fly off and land on a nearby tree, as if nothing had happened.
It was a lovely acorn woodpecker.
In that very tree, later that day, sat a red tailed hawk. We’d never seen one perch that close to the trailer. I hope he wasn;t eying woody somewhere nearby, though I’m sure he would have made a nice meal.
Sorry about your hawk. We saw a red fox today on that same section of Rt. 68. It wasn’t as fortunate as our woodpecker.
By: By MBW on 2007 10 09
One of my favorite poems.
A line from another of Jeffers’ poems, Rearmament:
“The beauty of modern
man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses,
The dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.“
By: By caracara on 2007 10 09
Categories:
Poetry
