Distance and Proximity

Do this: 
Google Ted Hughes hawk roosting
choose images: 
look carefully;
scroll down;
look slowly;
keep scrolling;
keep looking.
All the charts, 
pictures, 
explanations, 
presentations, 
diagrams, 
analyses --
none of them
-- not one --
approaches the power 
of the poem,
or 
of the bird.

Hunting Just Beyond the Deck

Hawk Roosting

by Ted Hughes

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads --

The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

Close Calls

I

I drove out to Grundy Lakes, hoping to find at least Clubtail. Instead I found this lovely clump of fungi, and as I was bending down to snap at least one decent photo, thunder clapped and rain spattered.

Fortunately, I made it to the car just in time.

II

I went to Abbo's Alley in late afternoon, hoping to find the Shadow Darner patrolling the creek, where he had been yesterday (without ever hovering for a photo op), and as I was turning on my camera, I heard a great crashing of leaves and limbs atop a tree across the creek.

The fallen hawk was as shocked as I, looked in both directions thrice, and then flew off without the squirrel, who made it a tree just in time.

III

I walked further up, looking for the darner and discovered, much to my horror, that somehow I had transferred just a bit of the oily brand-new insect repellent (Burt's Bees) from my arm to the camera itself, desperately pulled out my shirttail tried to clean it, ran to the car, and drove straight home.

At home, a good wipe-down with a camera cloth suggests that I may have made it just in time.

Notes to self: Expect the unexpected and get the dadgum camera ready before leaving the car!

Lake Cheston ABCedarian Day 7: H

H for Hawk, Handsaw, Holy Cow! and Hearing

I know a hawk from a handsaw even when the wind isn't southerly.

Witness:

OK, so maybe you can't see the hawk in that photo. How about this one?

The hawk says, Hear me now?"

A Cry

Photographing dogwood berries -- more than I've ever seen on the tree, I heard the telltale cry of a hawk, looked up, and saw him or her perched in my black walnut.  I snapped, but the gray sky and jerk of my hand produced only a shaky image, not nearly so bold as the call and call and call to a young one in the woods behind my house.

The red berry, hawk's cry and flight into the woods, chilly temperature and foggy rain -- all excite me: I can't wait for fall, and winter, and spring, and summer again, for each unexpected moments of pleasure.