Poetry
Sitting by the window with Lisa
I saw a hawk in the winter tree
The hawk opened its wings soft
flash of underwing
and drifted down even closer
to a lower branch It was a small hawk
with white breast of vertical striations
and long rounded tail my brief glimpse
before I stepped away called up the stairs
for others to come see
and Lisa was exclaiming It moved to the fence!
It traded places with the squirrel They did it again!
Look what they’re doing together!
* * *
The last day of the year I’m alone
water trickling through pipes stillness
out the window the shadow
of the hawk
With binoculars I find it
high in the spruce breakfast
in its yellow talons
The orange eye takes me in the head
turning turning Now it bends
to pull apart the bundle
of feather bone organ air
It tears methodical
lets the inedible bits fly
works down
to fuel
* * *
Throughout the day a pen
a page a broom a sink
fire and water
a window
Stalwart women speak
trudge to bus wait
essential work
of hands of spirit of duty
moving room to room
Look out the window there it is
drooping and swaying and turning upon itself
the world that surrounds
the hawk
One foot in front of the other
a broom a brush a wing
parts jointed together
we are
* * *
You want me to get you a drink?
young man to old woman
Water or something?
A Coolatta
What kind?
Coffee but it’s gotta be light-light
He goes out
Oh sugar she moans
sitting in her purple shirt
her sagging body
tethered to oxygen
She reads a magazine
waits to see the doctor
* * *
At night I imagine it folded
into itself on a branch
wrapped in wing of feather
against trunk of spruce
The whole cold stirring night
it dozes
Morning hunger it feasts
on a smaller bird
and I come back to life
like flow of spirit slow
into speed underground
with sound and cadence
with grammar
of thought
* * *
It lifts dives lands
all it can do
I follow its motions
and name them
a kind of doing
I plunge toward contact grasp
air only veer back up
ground far below stirring with potential
Then the particular
flickers the subtle movement browsing
unconscious Dive again
toward scent of it
wholeness of wing at work
I strike
warm fighting being stilling
Up to branch of tree I
squeeze life becomes
object possession cooling
in my hold I begin
to take the thing apart piece
by piece tossing extraneous
bits I work down to
the essence I eat
what I need
* * *
Or I myself am prey quiet among leaves
wandering after what I need
when thing of terror comes
down I had known
it was possible lived my life
in the awe of its presence
I never forgot it
and I had to forget it
In the truth of both I was seeking
the nubs of buds at ends
of branches I
was following taste of fuel seed to
seed then arc of wind of
dark soundless heat
I wake with instinct
slip to safety among tangle
of branches dense where
I stay separate
* * *
I slept again dreamed
two hawks in the tree
never before seen large white
with red crest on head and
back a pair of them
as they lifted off
side by side across sky
Now I think
how like chickens they were
and their presence had a kind of
domesticity though there
were the hawk’s wide wings
its strength and the blade
of its beak
* * *
With greater understanding
more is possible
so I imagined managed
coming and going into it
slowly why not
why so hard
* * *
Facing sunset— dome of cloudy sky
upward beams from below
pink undersides of purple clouds—
we’re part of something
larger than life
A bright darkness now
high and huge
the blue draining of light
turns to teal rose
the clouds like spills
of warm ink
* * *
Oh my it just sailed by
veering in flight
one wing tilted higher to
make the turn between
the houses wide wings close up
flashing of nearness
gone
Hilary Sallick is the author of Winter Roses (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and Asking the Form (forthcoming from Červená Barva Press in 2019). Her poems have appeared recently in The Bookends Review, Hawk and Whippoorwill, Whiskey Island, Ibbetson Street, The Inflectionist Review, Two Cities Review, and other publications. She teaches reading and writing to adult learners in Somerville, MA, and she is vice-president of the New England Poetry Club.