Endless Rain, Global Warming, What The Hawks Say

Flooding, lake rising every day…
my heart shakes, water breaks over its banks…
My lifetime of books, my art, my everything
is stored on ground lower than the lake.

It has slash-rained here in the Rockies
every day for last thirty…
another 11 we’ll outdo Noah…

Rains in the mountains afternoons- usual.
But not like this, thunder, sheet lightning,
fork lightning, lamp glowing yellow over
my battered desk, days wholly dark now.

Yet, lake falls back most every night,
let out over concrete spillways
turned on by big men
at big iron wheels…
and flood water rushes downhill
to Denver, fills bathtubs
to bathe black-soled children, to soak
old bones aching from this damp.

You wonder sometimes about
how excess can be fearsome to some,
ignored by others,
unexpected bounty to yet others.

Catalpa shooters have grown six feet tall
in three weeks time, but, in the fourth
week now, they strip-bark break and fall over,
like the Russian olives, weak from growing too fast…
Old maple tree limbs torn off at armpit by hail…
I think about those who say no global warming,
those who say global warming, yes.

All I know is the frond grass is chest high
and has not curled downward from heat,
and since the bunnies have so much green to eat
and keep multiplying like, well, like rabbits…

Then, something we haven’t seen in years,
three red-tail hawks glided in,
on open arms four feet wide…
They’ve lived here since last week,
ganging together, their Arabian dagger beaks
and fierce yellow eyes,
atop their wizard gowns of spotted stars.

They launch their hunts from my roof,
in the rain, pull upward to the top of the sky,
feathers blowing backward hard,
then dive, screaming straight down from on high,
dead falling between the lightning bolts
that stir the bowl of water we call ‘lake…’

a tussle on the earth then,
bouncing, bounding of bodies and feathers,
then sound of whap, whap, whap, taking off…
with dead passenger dangling.

The old men here say, ‘Good, and about time,
too goddam many rabbits to begin with.’

But there’s back-story…
When those very old men were younger,
they came from their corporate nests to this land,
and were a strange form of fussy, same as now…
forgetting I guess, that even flood, even wild disarray
has its balances, if only one had distance enough.

Instead, they had all the dead trees cut out,
to make things ‘tidy,’ to ‘clean up the place,’
to not let it be ’such a mess like when we got here’…

And then the hawks no longer came.
And then the rabbits began to rule the earth.
And then the men too long gone from the wilds,
never put two and two together.

You wonder sometimes about
how wildness can be fearsome to some,
ignored by some,
bounty to others.

And how humans can rid the land and sky
of some of their most exquisite exemplars
for lovemaking…
for the red-tailed hawks fly in pairs,
and pull up to the floor of heaven, before
the male plunges into a deep dive
and then back up in a steep ascent
until the moment…
the two cling to one another, interlocking talons,
folding in their wings,
and together,
fall spiraling toward earth…

such precise replication of the senses
some souls on earth have discovered
to be exactly so…
a flight with one’s love to the meniscus,
soaring in worth and love without limit,
thence falling toward earth in a flood of feeling,
of an entirely different kind–
godly and glorious.

——————
CODA
Some say the animals never speak,
never teach us anything…
but I would say this night,
the red-tailed hawks
dictated these very words
to set before those within hearing…

to cause remembering …
that humans, despite the earthly roil,
are still built first and foremost,
to fly starward…
and should sudden change drop over
one’s mind or the earth, then keep to
the sacred precepts of the BuddhaRaptor:

Hunt with daring;
Feast or famine, stay together;
Rebuild the nest even if wind knocks it down;
Choose and stay with a wise mate;
Raise your little wild children;
Make love often, bypassing the pedestrian,
aiming for the stratospheric.