A Moveable Garden

Part of my Feb 2024 Dream Poems project.

Seeing the Hawk 

At the corner of my human eye is a hawk, 
a goshawk, someone sent me photos of one today 
from Colorado, and here it is 
until I move my focus to it and now 
it’s a small gooseneck lamp 
perched on a desk 
but finding this and knowing this doesn’t stop me 
from seeing a hawk 
again and again 
when I look slightly elsewhere 
and every time, thrilled, 
I turn quick to meet it, to know it most fully, 
feather by feather, robust, and every time 
it's a lamp. A sleek dark lamp, blackish, 
like a hawk, but without a hawk’s streaky breast, 
without its sense of brawny self, and, 
I notice, with a wooden pedestal that a hawk lacks, 
being an animal and not a tree, not furniture, not in this room. 

I keep checking, just once more, 
because I know that time and place are mutable 
and that in the same way that gravity 
keeps this lamp from tilting off an edge, 
a precarious balance keeps this hawk here, 
appearing over and over when I turn, 
here just for me, my own manifestation 
waiting in the sideways space 
when the center dissolves. 

© M Wms 2024