Perhaps that Great Egret sometimes falters too
for all his deliberate pressing of those long black toes into the mud.

Is it anger there in that hunting, yellow eye?
Do you see yourself in that second before you strike through the water's surface?

And the nightmares? Do they shoot through your sleep too?
That heavy knife-bill swinging wildly for a moment as you wake, confused.

I can see as you see me, crouched here by the riverside, and that neither of us understands
quite what drives the rowing retreat of your angelic, white wings.

A feather dropped as you lit into the air and you must have seen, as you half-circled the sky,
that little something lost and carried by the river, flowing by, just out of my reach.

Tahoe Mountain Trail

 

And what would people like us find on that evening mountainside, where the fire passed through some years before?  The trail leads out and up through all the broken white trunks, charred in streaks of softly iridescent black and stood ghostly over the undergrowth.  Our chosen path cuts into the dark, rolling green of the hillside where flickering wrens trill out their song and retreat into the dense labyrinths of chaparral which already look ancient though, here, they couldn't be anything but young.  Then the leaves start to give way, higher up, where the reddish dust spreads thinly over rock deeply scraped by glaciers long since passed into dusk and vanished out into the vast lake now visible beyond.

 




Here the last of the snags give way to the first of the trees not touched by the flames.  Here we see, by the dozens, the elegant thrust and curling away of the seeds fallen from the Incense-cedar still standing above us.  Here Fox Sparrows have fed on the joyous red star burst of Sierra Gooseberries and left the spiny husks at the foot of the bush.  Here among the natural rubble we can hold up the long, roughened, sun bleached cones in the dimming light and pick out, along the horizon behind them, the limbs of their sibling Sugar Pines, heavy with cones and silhouetted against the blush of sunset and icy blue of the lake now fairly glowing beyond.





The lights of three boats pass in different directions over that distant water, aligning together for a moment and then pulling away.  And who couldn't feel it, then?  The underlying spirit of that ridge-- its long held scarring, the traces of its more recent pain, and the mitigating grace of life both abiding and returning.  It's everywhere as we turn back down the trail towards the warm home-lights of the forest valley and the headlights winking here and there through the trees.  The bats are out now, their nimble shapes arcing and looping after unseen insects across the deepening blue of the sky as it drifts into night.  Eventually, back down among the lost trees glowing faintly white under the moon, we stop to pick out constellations we are still learning as the stars take their places above.  And, barely seen out the corner of the eye, there the gliding, faint outline of an owl as it lands on a faraway branch, black against the lighter dark of the lake now calming beyond.

Hawks sleep lightly.  They wake to the movement of a leaf in the breeze, to the swaying whisper of grass, to the lengthening and shutting-off of shadows. They are fugitives who have escaped from everything but fear.

                                                                                                    The Peregrine, J.A. Baker 

*         *          *

When the cool of evening finally comes
and with it the sweet breathing out of the pines...

You may rest.

You don't need an answer to that question or
to keep holding what's left of your failure.

You can let yourself rest.

Should there sleep in your heart a fear of morning,
with your thin body curled tight like a talon...

It's okay.  You must rest.

They are all out there still or moving softly
In the forest dark and half at peace with night.

Please, just rest.