This afternoon my nerves tingle with spring. It’s hard to deny the season when dandelions, hyacinths, and tulips add their voices to the clamor of change. Even the dog speaks, shedding her winter coat in dry clumps, which I scatter from her brush as offerings for the birds. Because I hear them calling, the cardinals and mockingbirds, chickadees and robins. Even a tufted titmouse, a new song for an old yard, aching with hope.
By decay, I mean death and its attendants. Detritus and carrion. Decomposition. The rank rot of demise invades every corner of life, a weltering profusion of scavengers overhead and underfoot. They sort and clean, engineering life from death in dank procession, so that leaves grow anew and grass sprouts fresh for the grazers. Scavengers both hasten and stem entropy’s tide, converting order to chaos to order again. Rapid and ageless, decay is our most accurate measure of time, and our most pervasive reminder that time is measured.
The hawk attack prompted me to pull this piece out of my files. The writing is old, but some of the photos are new.
Yesterday afternoon this hawk killed a robin in my back yard. I don’t know if he is the same hawk as the one that killed our baby rabbit, but I have my suspicions. This time, instead of flying away with his prize, he stayed in the rose bed. He ate for nearly a half-hour, even gulped down the bones before he left.
This is only the second time I’ve seen a hawk in my yard, while robins are a constant presence. I’m torn between awe and sorrow, between the stunning beauty of my visitor and the sad spectacle of orange feathers strewn in the grass.
I don’t know if this is a young Cooper’s Hawk or a Sharp-shinned Hawk. Maybe neither? What do you think?
Beautiful Things
See all the small
Beautiful things
I’ve crushed under my boots
Or my tires
Or my hurried, strident tongue
The perfection that was a beetle
Splintered because its jeweled shell
Could not bear my weight
And my regret might feel
Like a question
I haven’t the wisdom to ask
The intricate heartwork
That was a rabbit
Dashed under my tire
And left for the vultures
Who might partake of rabbit
Skin and fur and bones
Delicate answers
Ground within the gizzard
And lost
So that should I someday
Remember the question
Or think it first in a dream
Only the vulture could answer
The simplicity of “Why?”
Lost for lack of time
Or patience
Or knowledge enough of children
To know that the answer doesn’t matter
Only the voice
And the moment
And the ritual of exploration
So I offer the only answer
That addresses the question
“Because it must”
Which is also “because
I must”
Which answers all the questions
I have the wisdom to ask
Published in The 2006 Chaffin Journal
If there were no life
Would not the Earth
Still have beauty?
If skies were not
So blue
Nor clouds so shapely
Set against blue
If tides never rose
To purl across sand
If all were stone
Pocked with volcano
Cluttered with crater
Naked of everything air
Would not the Earth
Still have beauty
If there were no eyes
To catalogue her wonders?
Rae Spencer 