Carla Panciera
The Stationary Lungs of Hawks
Red-tails love open fields, alfalfa flashing goldfinch. Love clouds at their backs, the spoon-silver water of ponds, hills mooning up green and full of prey. Their lungs fill holes in bones. Some of this I know. Some I have inferred.
My father, an asthmatic, tried to teach me: Pay attention. But we earthly beings, we drivers and walkers, pass the field at the end of our street each morning and feel solely purposeful. We see no explosions of gold, no rufous tail, aloft and circling, that should be so impossible to miss.
The red-tail mating dance is high altitude, an aerial display. And when, finally, he latches on, they tuck their wings and freefall.
Our own bodies do not allow this kind of love. We weigh ourselves down with exhalations. Our lungs do too much work.
The Requirements of an Injured Hawk
Make sure it is grounded, not guarding a kill. Go home for gloves. Leave the dog. Avoid the beak, the talons. No babytalk. No crying.
Tuck the wings. Do not try to make it drink. Do not spoon-feed.
Cover the head. The hawk will close one eye and dream panoramically. Ledge-height, cliffside, full-color views of the world that would make you dizzy. Everything below triangulated, oblivious.
Do not sing. Especially do not sing. It will be your first car ride with a hawk in a box beside you. You will imagine it springing up from its shock, its sudden wingspan wide as the fields you pass. Feathers at your earlobe, talons at your neck.
Instead, there will be silence and you will consider lullabies to fill it. You will imagine what it listens for. But it isn’t song; it’s owls.
You will have no idea what the bird makes of its pain. No idea of maggots already at the wound.
Keep driving. Remind yourself: This hawk, too, is motherless.
The Riparian Dreams of Hawks
Stream beds. Leaf hustle in the understory. The carcass of dove meat in the cache, plucked clean of feathers.
The husbandry that refills sunflower seeds, millet, lures ground feeders. The topiary from which songbirds might be sprung upon at thistle.
Wishbones split in pursuit of prey. The male Coopers’ flesh offerings and obeisance. Their mistletoe love nests. Their cannibalistic mates.
Even my mother, fluting pie crust, spooning sugar, knitting booties, dreamt knife blades sharp as talons.
#
Carla Panciera’s newest book is Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir (Loom Press, 2023). She has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in numerous journals. Her collection of short stories, Bewildered, received AWP’s 2013 Grace Paley Short Fiction Award. Her collections of poetry are One of the Cimalores (Cider Press Book Award, 2005) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera Poetry Prize, 2010).