The Ides of March

 

     

The morning sky is overcast and we are thin under its gentle light held in dawning
Late winter and downriver through willow and alder, over marsh grass and needle ice to lake's edge
Stranded there in sand bars sleep hundreds of pools of ice still frozen in spite of the building warmth of day
Will it be for the last time this year we will see them held solid from the dreaming of their continual movement?
Through some alchemy of the wind and sand carried down from the mountains by the same water it now holds,
We see something of what must occupy the sleeping waters, what it remembers and what it anticipates
It charts for us the cycle it has always traveled, mapping what it found to love there

There are frosted peaks and rocky valleys, rivulets and mighty currents around distant islands.
Limbs of trees, the flowing bark and the fanning, twisting root.
And there too their quicker friends, the remembered insects and ghosts of flowers trapped beneath

And the calling birds echoed here and there in the ice,
the tips of their wings, secondaries spread in flight, bobbing tails and shining eyes,
feet that would soon break the surface again

Beneath the ice one could see the water taking back up its song and

It almost seemed, if one could have looked long enough,

as though one might have seen one's place and home,

a land these waters must also have passed

as the sun broke through the clouds

Robinson Jeffers

 

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.

~Robinson Jeffers

*I think the important thing here is to ask who it is who is speaking.  I feel that there is only one actual hawk here and that the plural in the title simply signifies kinship and connection.  If only men that are dying remember the wild God of the world, then the authorial voice must feel as though he is dying.  A man living with his family at most, cut off from a communal people, he recognizes a similar proud struggle against an inevitability in the hawk before him.  That he would sooner kill a man than a hawk maybe speaks to this estrangement from others being a conscious choice but if he is referring to himself with his mention of violence then there would still be penalties to give him pause, both of a spiritual and bluntly physical nature.  What does it mean for him that the hawk's passing merged in the dusk with the fierce crack of a gun?  What does it mean that he offered mercy to the redtail, first through pity and then with finality?  Is it simply age that makes him identify with the hawk's incapacity?  Night-herons are a communal species.  What does it mean that their river is flooded?