K. and I were talking about anxiety. I told her a story about a time, a few years ago, when the worst of it came over me, and I was saved—nothing else, just this—by the writing of poems. "Devotions" was the first poem in what became a lengthy poem cycle.
Devotions
The hawk came three months after the fox
had taken that one last lubricious
step onto my porch, a day of deer
unclasping the bracelet of themselves
across my lawn. I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t been
sleeping well, had not been on the lookout
for the hawk or for the toad, the crow, the snake
the single cricket that pulls a hawk down from the sky.
Nor for an egg; I wasn’t looking for an egg —
the mind fighting the night and at war
with the age I have become, wishing I had learned color
instead of words, but then: This hawk, with that telling
streak of rust for a tail and those four pounds
at least of bird encasing bone and soul, in the morning
in my garden, where it was late in the season and things
had turned to seed and no one, nothing but a bird and I
could guess the garden’s lore. I liked the hawk,
therefore, from the start, and I asked its name,
and it looked straight through me, for my bones
were hollow and my soul was the suggestion of insomnia,
and we were alone, besides, each on the verge of excavating
secrets but choosing to amble instead, from the garden,
across the mud pocks, toward the Japanese maple,
side by side and counting benefactions, the hawk walking
the way hawks walk, and I in devout deliverance of dawn.
Ohmy, I love this. Was the cycle published anywhere, Beth?
Wow! What beautiful writing.
I love this. And I have never done anything like that with my anxiety. I'm impressed.
So beautiful ... and, this post ... just what I needed to read on this particular day. Thank you!
Love "a day of deer unclasping the bracelet of themselves". Great imagery. Well done.
Oh Beth, how inspiring this is, in form, in word, in thought, in communion. And to think a cricket might pull a hawk from the sky! Oh, love this.
xo
erin