Driving in a rising arc, past the dry grass at the edge of the slough,
mounting up to the freeway,
I meet a hawk.
Rising, too, from the grass, he hangs
over my windshield.
His hard yellow eye regards me:
curving glass, blue and grey hurtling metal,
my face the shadow in the machine, as if
I were its soul, looking out.
The hawk looks in, and we move together
momentarily, staring,
ascending toward the dusk.
A flash of white underwing, brown wingtips,
and his eye vanishes from my view.
I reach the crest.
Cars rush. The moon grazes the bellies of the clouds,
a white disk, nearly full, flat and bright
like the feral eye of the hawk.
The moon cruises with me past the stand of trees
some farmer once planted for a windbreak.
Their hairy eucalyptus arms now edge a golf course
and this freeway, that presses over the backs of the hills
leading to and from my home.
Red taillights, white headlights. The smoke blue sky
is rippled with movement: a bustle of wings, grey bodies
with their long black necks pulling them forward
through the evening air, heading for the slough,
their wide wings pumping. The Canada geese
don't glide, they flap, bouncing
through the evening air and over the roofs of the cars
heading toward the salt grass and water
they have visited countless years running.
I think the golfers may have seen them.
I cannot hear if they make a sound
any more than the hawk or the moon,
all crossing my path homeward.
They disappear into twilight
wild and as unconcerned with my presence
as they can afford to be.
My passing takes no toll on them;
they do not watch me go, or gasp as I do at a flash of wing,
a gaze of golden iron.
Driving through the landscape I am simply become it:
dull grey of the concrete, dark blue of the coming night,
heavy with gravity, as compelled by routine
as they by the urge to migrate,
the need to kill a mouse to live.
Dark sky takes them up into its star-filled arms.
Dark road bears me down with the dark earth.
11/30 - 12/1/96