Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.
- Thomas Hardy, ‘The Darkling Thrush’
I.
The calendar of the hawk
finds its feast in blindness,
fasts inside the subterrain
and dances in dives and blood.
In our garden’s burgeoning -
its buried seeds and muscle -
offerings are stored inside
the prudential sleep of earth.
The months are apparitions
indwelt by earthen struggle.
We are the centrifugal
tether of this season's wheel.
II.
For once, the hawk is absent
from the trees behind the house:
the squirrel fasts with the ant,
their works resolved and buried.
The vixen runs her gauntlet.
In sky, the clouds look eastward
from the tension in the field.
Life remembers life for now.
The hawk has never bothered
to come close enough to me
to make my gaze fall fearful
from his pair of cedar trees.
III.
Hawk leaves me scrolls of wicker
in tongues of autumn deadfall.
My quill, a lone pinion
from his molted armory.
Flies try their revolutions,
flare, and in the cooling die;
a caravan of voles creep
west by lunar mysteries.
The clouds lower their shoulders
to reveal the feast again.
I have been left to furnish
rocks as bowls of sacrifice.
IV.
Ossuaries plant themselves.
The trees are buttressed in bone.
The predator is keening
as the sun enkindles skin.
Provender is quartered out,
each animal past crucis.
Silence ferrets out their names,
their lilt recalling purpose.
Their wisdom comes in gristle
and a power from their blood.
Adam sings the names to make
a liturgy for the hawk.