Eagle

for Sara Van den Bossche

She releases the earth,
every dawn, opens
like day and closes like night.
The human highway
is nothing to her,
blunt in its purpose,
coursing to no destination
she calls home. The squirrel's
chatter, the flycatcher’s shrill
empty gossip beneath her shadow,
no rumor scores her quiet.
All night
she wakes, and wakes again,
nothing to tell, no story

to sound, the broken syllables of the lake,
the susurration of the river her
names for hunger.
Her talons seize the steelhead
and grasp the trout,
but in a kingdom of pinprick
birdsong she is the tidings,
now and now, echoing nothing,
prey to no rumor, silence her anthem.

The Crocodile

This ruse, enduring for days,
will eventually cease, but now
even the birds mistake him for a log,
or a stone the fleeting drought
has lifted above the current.
Because there is a current, even in this cocoa-dark
side-pool, and the solution to hiding
so plainly under the sun is to glide as
the magnolia petals do, or the fallen limb of a tree,
as though alive not at all―except secretly,
to hunger.

No other creature
could survive and be so torpid.
And yet he is ready,
the humid vault of the wetland
his camouflage. Wit and song
he leaves for others, prime

in his vigil, knowing without
memory, trusting without faith.
The door of his heartbeat opens,
and the same door slowly shuts. His sleep
and his waking are the same. Noon
sifts downward, and then the sunset
and soon, he knows, surely
very soon some quicker more beautiful
sojourner will discover
with what swiftness comes the end.

More animals poems soon (!)