February 7, 2013

Sunshine!  I'm always so glad about sunshine!  You couldn't ask for a bluer sky, it positively vibrates with blue and is cloudless.  A hawk is circling the park across the street, tilting and banking, in increasing circles.  On one of its rounds I could see the bunch of white feathers under its tail, and the shape of the wing is different from the vultures, whose wings are broader and seem flatter.  They soar too but they do a lot less flapping than a hawk, as if they don't want to put out the energy, just take advantage of heat and every breeze.  I don't see any of the vultures today, just the lone hawk, and I see them so rarely it's a treat every time.   The ground is still soggy from yesterday's rain, the striped cat cannot sleep in the sun at the end of the driveway.  I don't know where he is taking his morning nap, the leftover water will evaporate in the sun pretty soon and perhaps he can find a dry place later. 

A pair of fighter jets just streaked overhead, loud enough to wake the dead, a flash of white and they were gone.  Seems a morning for rare occurrences, hardly ever have the jets come over so far, though some big helicopters go over about once a week and for all their noise when I go out to look, it seems I never can find them, but those jets were like gleaming roaring arrows flung out against the blue of the sky, no contrails, just an excess of sound. 

There are poems about hawks but no one about morning hawks that I could find.  I'm pretty sure that was a Harris hawk and there are some pretty spectacular pictures of them on the Net.  I did find this lovely poem by Robert Penn Warren; it has some luscious language in it, from the sublime opening to the prosaic closing, bringing us back down to earth! 

Evening Hawk 

From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through

Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,

Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding

The last tumultuous avalanche of

Light above pines and the guttural gorge,

The hawk comes.

               His wing

Scythes down another day, his motion

Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear

The crashless fall of stalks of Time. 

The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error. 

Look!  Look!  he is climbing the last light

Who knows neither Time nor error, and under

Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings

Into shadow. 

          Long now,

The last thrush is still, the last bat

Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics.  His wisdom

Is ancient, too, and immense.  The star

Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain. 

If there were no wind we might, we think, hear

The earth grind on its axis, or history

Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar. 

Robert Penn Warren 

There are so many ways to look at anything, so many ways to describe things, that it's not surprising that each poet brings their whole life to every poem, all their experiences whether ordinary or extra-ordinary.  Today just getting to see the hawk out there hungry and hunting makes me glad I am not a rabbit or a mouse.  The hawk is gone now and all that's left is the impression of the hungry hunter on an even more blank blue sky, the emptiness more empty from being filled for those few moments with all that life.