Classic Poem

Ashore and car-borne again, headed
roughly west-southwest from Wareham
and Cape Cod, considering the Humpback and Finback
on their alien and vaporous planet —
how the differently-colored water
at its head makes a baleen whale
seem a continent unto itself,
or an atoll, with submerged reef,
shallows, tidemark, skyline
steady above the waves ... One can imagine
being on an island, hardly being an island.
Which of course is the death of him.
He can't hide. Not a whole geography.

Nor can we. Though we bulk less,
we seem to make more of a wake
than a whale — fifty years, say —
and everything on the record. . . .Hell,
we are all wake, and must live with it. —
And drive faster and faster, lest,
slowed down, we be overtaken
by a following wave. — Unlike
those trees there, epauletting
the road shoulder. They, for sure,
stand to be counted: Huge
lives lived in one spot ... (They lift
their arms in bewilderment
at the traffic — all that
lateral velocity merely
to be parked somewhere else. . . .)

But it's already autumn. I mean
once more, if it's not too late,
to hail " ... Kingdom of daylight's dauphin " , that
cloud- and crag-haunter, falco peregrinus. . . .
" He is dying out they say —
they say, not I. I, mind,
who have never hooded or belled or flown
falcon of any kind
can't cancel him — subtract from sky
sky's heart, that beating speck . . . . "

No,
nor will I. Nor will you, Tim,
whom we took on a walk once — seven
you were then — and showed a hawk overhead.
You followed it till it was lost
in a storm of light and cloud-chasms
over hills gilded and dim with distance,
then you said, more as if to it
than to any of us, " I hate people.
I wish I could be free like that. "

I know how it is, Tim, having quaked,
half a century back, in that same
surprising scapular tug aloft,
with no way to answer, no out
from the multiple prisons of the flesh.
Yet I remember elation, not bitterness, glimpsing
so fabulous and majestic a dominion
(Seven leagues! Seven leagues at a lift
of those sunbeam stilts!)
There was a kind of glory even
in being denied it. . . . None perceived then
what " people " could do to a planet —
with our billions of little intellectual mandibles. Though
now every seven-year-old knows. Well,
come on, Tim, even so
you felt it, the totemic tug,
the shadow of Horus, hawk-god of the Pharaohs;
or that odd, bitter cry
had not been torn from you.
Even now at the world's end, then,
he is with us, anointing in wind
or light his unlikely hierophants.

In England there is, or was,
one who for ten years, alone,
tramped the downs and cliff-brows of Essex
like a Majus, his star the wild peregrine.
He'd no wish to tame or possess, only
to be received, if might be,
into their wildness — and was once: A falcon
perched near him and preened, indifferent. He asked no more.

And Second Frederick of Hohenstaufen,
the Holy Roman Emperor,
was wont to forget his warlords on the Dneiper,
his tribute of kings, his castles and concubines,
to canter over the cold stubble, cloud-towarding,
and unfist the gyr and the peregrine,
like bolts back at the gods, tears in his eyes
for the untakeable heights.

Then a long fall to one
neither emperor nor anchorite,
alas, an old miser of time
and wastrel of all else,
failed, faithless again and again, save
to that same — say what it may — gale-
glorying, dawn-drawn Odysseus
in his white-isled Aegeans of air.

And thence to you, Tim, near twenty now.
Hardly what one calls old, only
it is late, late, and
the value to be placed on a single year
expands toward infinity. Zoion
Holokausticon has learned little since,
in the sign of Horus, you cried out
to be free of him, free of us.

South-southwest and then South:
Cape May — and the call goes up,
" Peregrine " . And all glasses swing
out toward the dunes where one comes
cart-wheeling and side-winding, black
in the sea's blaze, rings up
up up on a shaft of sea-light
to hang awhile with ospreys, accipiters —
at their height like a hatch of moths
migrating to the moon, so many,
funnelled here in the west wind; then
he dives, like a meteor, at a mourning dove,
passes it by, beats southward again is gone.

No mistaking the glory, the fierce joy. He flies
the way you or I would fly
were we to awake one morning, the rainbow
wings of a Fra Angelico angel
fitted to our shoulders.

But what would our falco-phile
recluse of Essex make of Cape May
in autumn, where a thousand raptorial birds,
the odd peregrine among them,
can pass overhead in an hour? Rarity's,
after all, what we ask of them —
what we ask of everything, wary
at the heart's hard exchequer
of too-easy interest. Back in Essex
the hawk, though with no economics, no
esthetic, comprehends rarity; has
to be rarity itself, or starve; wherefor
the epiphanic long fall, the bolt,
once in a lifetime, out of a bland blue
blank, cherub'd with steepling pigeons.

The pigeons at Cape May are tethered,
and flung to tree-height from a blind —
hawk-bait at the banding station.

A place of lese-majeste ,
one would guess, to our Essexman,
where raptors shoved into tubes
lie on tables like bunches of celery
awaiting their bin marks.

Then they're let go (It is not
" ... ungentle, only thoroughly departmental. " )
with the bander pronouncing on peregrines:
" ... Really a stupid bird. We'll catch
the same tiercel four times. . . . "

I did not ask him
whether, in his opinion,
nature corrupts men
or men corrupt nature

(or whether the question only
un-asks itself, an en-
antidromion ). But
the idea of that tiercel
turned loose and looming again
to tree height and folding for the same dive
into the same net, as helpless
to comprehend nets as a tentworm
to comprehend freedom — while
his first swerve out of wilderness
into civility wins him
a leg-iron for life...Isn't there
a tale the obverse of his,
concerning bands on the mind,
and nets — the nets of judgement,
of blood and custom, of meaning-
against-unmeaning — and whether
we are ever out of them?