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.

A Field, Breathing

My blog has taken on an unintentional theme of late: sights seen along my daily commute. I suppose that topic isn't surprising since I spend almost two hours each day in the car. Sometimes I spend that time well, listening to classical music or NPR, thinking, noticing the changing landscape. This last is my favorite part of the commute.

The light now is changing with the seasons, as a result of which I see sunrise and moonset almost every day. Today, the fields were filled with morning mist, like the breath of earth lifting to meet the rising sun.For some reason, as I passed this field along Highway 64, I thought of a poem by Ted Hughes.

Ted Hughes, The Horses

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird --
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline -- blackening dregs of the brightening grey --
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey -- ten together --
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

with draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew's tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging --
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red leveling rays --

In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

This morning, far away from the "din of crowded streets," I felt as if I "hear[d] the horizons endure" in the breathing of silent fields.