Tossed up like a handful of confetti,
she, red tail, is elbowed off
like a bride to the wild, but she reels
and staggers, flies low,
a tumult of wings daring height.
Quiver-flight, girdle of light
flight, anxious-flight, flight of reckoning,
of three-month rehabilitation.
She’d been deemed release-ready,
but I wonder what landmines
in her mind have settled, which are exploding now?
We hope the late spring
sun will hail her, beckon her back
to sky, that she’ll remember
this park where we found her, wounded,
and return to fluent flier
again, but for all we know, the sun’s
dazzle could be a knife-
point to her eyes, and the out-
of-the-blue freedom
another kind of extraction.
Perhaps the world shivers, flusters her
in its sudden sharpness. The last time
you wandered off a subway
onto the streets of a foreign city, what signs
did you fail to follow?
A familiar maple might be an anchor
for a moment, but soon jays arrive,
strafing and screaming at her
and she has forgotten her own powers—
counterpoint of attack, swift beak
to belly. Maybe only higher gods
can mend trauma’s corrosions
of the mind. Maybe the pages
of the world flip too quickly or the text
runs backwards, and she is still just
a juvenile, slurring the geometries
of flight, then teetering from limb
to limb. Maybe there’s no mercy
believable for this age
of nuclear fallout and mass extinction,
but reader, believe me:
Nature’s deus ex machina in the form
of a mature red tail hawk
(her mother?) did appear, exploding from the tree-
tops to defend her, scattering
the jays like loose change. Who could have foreseen
it? And who could have foreseen
another hawk gliding in from the east
as if part of the family?
Who could have foreseen daughter
reunited with parents, the rhyme
of their bodies a ballast, her hawkness restored?
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 1.
Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collection Queer Fish, a winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize (Dream Horse Press, 2017) and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). The craft anthology, Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, which is co-edited by Sarah and Virginia Konchan, is forthcoming from The University of Akron Press. Sarah’s writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Ecotone, Tin House, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches at the University at Albany-SUNY.
See all items about Sarah Giragosian
