"Feeding the Hawk" Commentary
If you sit and watch an undomesticated and unconfined animal for a while, you see an alien alertness—alertness so full of the present there's no room for past or future. Wendell Berry calls it "the peace of wild things/ who do not tax their lives with forethought/ of grief." And the naturalist John Burroughs, watching bluebirds in the spring raise one brood after another and let them go, observes, "No time is wasted in pity or regret."
He might have said, no time is available for pity or regret. A wild animal lives its whole life in the moment before its death. Part of us longs for that kind of present-ness. It is the goal of most, if not all, of our spiritual disciplines. But we also know that we cannot rest in that presentness: felix culpa! The enabling wound of human consciousness drives us back into the measure of time—into history, hope, poetry. We can, however, be present for a while. And somehow—as part of the world's gift to us, the gift of our evolutionary inheritance—to have been there ever is to be there now.
I am already given to the power that rules my fate.
And I cling to nothing, so I will have nothing to defend.
I have no thoughts, so I will see.
I fear nothing, so I will remember myself.
Detached and at ease,
I dart past the Eagle to be free.
This prayer from Carlos Castaneda's book, The Eagle's Gift, was somewhere behind the poem, "Feeding the Hawk," though I was not thinking of Castaneda's prayer as I wrote the poem. In fact, I think of this poem as a gift from a sparrow encountered one evening in November in some woods along the shore of New Hampshire's Great Bay. My part in it was to ask a question and to recall, by way of response, an encounter with another bird years before:
A neighbor who kept a redtailed hawk for falconing asked me to feed her while he was away. One evening I discovered that the hawk had gotten tangled in its tether and was hanging upside down, exhausted, from its perching ring. I set the bird on a falconer's glove on my left arm, as I fumbled with my right hand to untangle its jesses. At one point, the bird picked up its right talon and stepped off the glove onto the sleeve of my flannel shirt. Both of us froze, looking into one another's eye, for what seemed an eternity. If the hawk had chosen to close its talon, it would have gone through me right to the bone, and I felt a current of wildness flowing through me that was both terrifying and exhilarating. The bird slowly opened its talon, stepped back onto the glove, and allowed me to complete the task.
In shaping the poem, I've tried to make my part grow out of the wild part. There are just eight lines that share the left margin (where what we know and say comes out of the wild silence), and read together, these eight lines tell the sparrow's story. Then the poem may be read again (and again), adding in the other two layers of indented lines— the human elaboration of the story to the right, down the stream of our reading, remembering, saying.