Читать книгу Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain - Russell Thornton - Страница 11

Nest of the Swan’s Bones

She will build a nest of the swan’s bones...

—Robinson Jeffers, “Shiva”

High in the blue air above the dumpster in the back lane,

between the mountains and the tidal flats,

on the thermals and updrafts a summer hawk does slow turns.

The crows pick at the waste on the asphalt.

The men push jingling shopping carts. Or stand and mimic life

in a prison yard. The wild white swan is dead. Where I caught

trout as a child, no trout swim now. The drives

and crescents gouge ravines, make creeks disappear. Where wild

baby fish run, they run the gauntlet of penned fish. They are eaten alive,

their eyes popping out as sea lice feed inside their heads.

The hawk dances. Circles, dances. Its shadow flits

unnoticed across men, spreads over a rodent or bird

it dives to, inserts claws into, and clamps large feet on, stomping it

as if beating time. It splays flesh and flies

away with it into sunlight. The hawk takes up an owl’s hoot

and a sparrow’s last chirp, a heron’s bill-snap and a smelt’s silence

into its disinterested scream. The swan

glides in beauty in the hawk’s sight, and fills all the hawk sees

with brilliant, blinding whiteness. Moment by moment,

the men go back and forth. They search out anything they can trade

for a full bottle or syringe or pipe. In my room with the lit-up screen,

I lie and dream my dream. I feel it must also be God’s,

this dream of the person of persons. Where the dream comes through,

it punctures me, and I breathe dark air. The air thuds

into pockets like a plummeted elevator. O monster home. O

specialty wine outlet. O auto mall. The wild white swan

is dead. The hawk hunts and kills the swan for love. It will build a new

nest of the swan’s bones. It will keep this nest unseen.

I am a person. I soil the cage in which my heart flings

and flings itself against the bars. I try to own

the view of every murderer, and yet I try to sing

the way out through the hawk’s claw-holes to the repose

in the nest of fire at the tip of the hawk’s wing.