January 26th: Humility

January 26^th: Humility

is watching is the spot where the hawk

is lost to me in the blue or rose

or sinking so toward the drink it's still

blue or rose since it’s all about

mirrors and spilling it all back

if it’s a clear morning and spent

one foot then one foot in the old

growth where a commercial logger

knew knew! to be old growth and spared

he did he laid down his ax and picked

up his people who’d walked through

there a century ago with their stones

and their ox and they hauled heavy

lines that spined down and up

the mountains they walked on moss
all those generations ago

and it called them eventually back

it called them with its muffled song.

It is the time of year a frost pushes

up from the water we never see

deep as she is in the ground, a shrug-

ging some poet noticed when he walked

and put (come spring when nothing

at all needed him) rock on rock

and saw himself too as he used to

be in the skin of a doe in the inside

light of night that’s never as black

as the inside of that hawk’s eye

come killing time to tell me surviving

that isn’t any more than just slight

of hand isn’t just mirror bright isn’t

shift just coincidence to the left

when the bird aimed straight and true

and all that’s left is dust covering

the tracks of whatever small thing got

away, or today, a ripple on the water

an empty claw dripping, and deep (we have

to see it inside ourselves) the trout's

gills fanning if that’s what they do when

they get away.  Or these old growth

cedars and pines, how in some places

if we lean on them, there’d be

a breathing we couldn’t hear or feel but

for relief reaching all the way up to the sky.