When I see you, wings stretched wide
against the blue, sun threading your fringed
wingtips, my shoulders tense as if they could 
sprout wings, as if I could rise to coast the 
thermals with you, gliding over the sunset 
field, weightless and free.

Shaping the air with my flight, I’d learn
the way of hawk, learn to savor a keen
vision that sees scrambling prey, learn
to hover, dive and eat, not minding feathers 
in my beak, or bones. Perched on a fencepost, 
I’d strip my prize clean.

Look, we say to one another, there it is,
right there, just crossing the highway,
heading toward the ridge. We crane our 
necks, slow the car, roll down the window,
and already you have lifted us out of 
ourselves, hawk, into your sky. 

In last night’s dream, I gathered up my
mother, small and easily draped over my
shoulder, to carry her off to some safe
haven. There was danger near us, maybe
flood or fire. And I woke before I knew 
that she was whole.

Perhaps it was you I saved her from,
hawk, tiny creature that she was,
weaving her way through the tall grass
we all must brave on our path to sleep.
Or perhaps I was you, taking her back 
to my ample nest, my little nestling.

At the Continental Divide, I should have been
a bird. Barely able to breathe in that rarified
air, I gave myself to range upon range of the 
Rockies, my head spinning as I rose. 

Once in a voiceless movie, shot from the 
perspective of a hawk, I became both adult
and chick, flew high above the fields and 
villages below, my wings rowing air.

Following the silver membrane of a river, 
I traced its twists and turns through rosy hills,
cast my shadow on a thread of stream,
carried pungent wood-smoke home to nest.

The humans below me, what did they know 
of the great water course? Did they feel the tug 
of the moon on distant seas, the ebb and flow
of saline tides in mortal blood? 

Yet back in my body, I remembered a dowser,
my late husband’s grandmother, who, holding 
a forked stick between her two gnarled hands, 
almost lost her balance at the source.

Distant or remote, in time or space, 
as in a far journey or distant music 
on the wind. Beyond—a flickering
from the blue horizon.

Born into the longitude and latitude 
of time, we emerge at a nexus of
shimmering lines. Remember those 
old albums of black and white 

glossies cornered into little black 
pockets we licked and pasted onto
black pages? Fixed there, the faces 
of our living and our dead stare at us 

before they leap into the far, diving 
over the edge. See how they shrink 
to specks, draining the photograph
through an infinite funnel.

The shadow of a hawk just flew
across the springing grass. It, too, 
comes from beyond, winging its way 
toward tomorrow, tomorrow, and 

tomorrow, in its wake a calendar
marked by bristle and bone, by fair 
and fowl, as it arrows through the 
aether of its wing-bound days.