H is for Hawk

The rabbit and I look at each other. It realizes this stare is an involvement in death, and disappears. Mabel doesn’t see it until the moment where the rabbit becomes air as it pops back down the hole, but she has to fly anyway, to the after-image, just in case;

The ground has a deep crust of snow. Everything is poised as if it might shake itself.

Memory and love and magic. What happened over the years of my expeditions as a child was a slow transformation of my landscape over time into what naturalists call a local patch, glowing with memory and meaning.

is plodding, slow work, like wading through treacle.

SOMETIMES WHEN LIGHT dawns it simply illuminates how dismal circumstances have become.

The kitchen window threw a soft square of light into the garden.

Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.

I SAT ON the train clutching the folder with the speech inside, ankles burning from the heater on the floor. Outside, winter breathed in. Papery skies. Glittering trees. A wash of backlit fields that folded and shrank as the city grew.

There’s a brumous, pewter light outside, as if someone had stuck tracing paper against the glass.