Country Come to Town

A Kitchen-Window Poem about wilderness. (What?)

Cooper’s hawk, before his visit to the big bad city. Photo by Richard Sagredo on Unsplash

A friend pointed out with some delicacy recently that a lot of my posts from the past few months have been of older poems. She’s not wrong — so, Cynthia, here’s a change-up just for you, one of my first poems of 2024.

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VISITOR


From my kitchen window I spy a Cooper’s hawk
perched on the roof of the apartment house
behind my own, clear morning sky defining
the blunt ballistic outlaw shape of him,
motionless as he glares into the ragged back-lots
three stories down, where field mice and sparrows
outwait his deadly shadow. What brings you
here, friend, to this neighborhood? I ask him
silently, not that I’m sad to see you
but surely these human-rigged heights
and valleys, this meager prey, are less
than you deserve; a wilder field, towers
of tall conifers, cracked slopes of shale and granite,
the crisp untrafficked air, deeply alive
and deeply silent – why are you not there
instead of here?
                              I glance away, then back,
and he is vanished, roof-ledge empty
as if he never lit there. The morning long,
next morning too, I watch for him, see nothing 
above the roofline but the same clear sky.

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[You can listen to an audio version of the poem using the little widget above the photograph.]

I’ve lived in the city all my adult life, but I grew up next door to wilderness. I pay attention when wilderness comes visiting — or reclaiming its stake in the terrain that we carelessly think of as our own. This hawk has visited my neighborhood a time or two before, and seeing it always gives me goosebumps. I know there are whole studies and live-cams devoted to wildlife, including raptors, in urban settings; seeing this one unheralded and untagged in my own back yard, watching it go about its business as if it were in the wild — here’s a system of structures to perch and nest and shelter on, over there’s where the prey hides out — gives me a new perspective on what “wild” even means. This hawk doesn’t need what I’d think of as an appropriate setting to live its wild life. I think of wilderness in terms of geography; the hawk is made of wilderness, brings wilderness with it wherever it goes.