Sometimes characters crop up in multiple poems. Hawk-On-The-House is one of those. Also Sisyphus and a few other mythical folk. I thought there were–maybe–a couple of poems featuring Hawk-On-The-House. However, while reviewing some drafts I realized there are actually quite a few poems he shows up in.
You might as well meet Hawk-On-The-House now, because you’ll see him again, if not during National Poetry Month, then eventually. Spring is one of his favorite times of year.
Hawk-On-The-House
When you are the Hawk-On-The-House, the idea of humans dying
doesn’t strike you with the impact the manic world wants you to feel,
you aren’t afraid there will be too few chipmunks and mice
you don’t worry about whether that half-sick snake you pulled
from the edge of the trees was too rotten to pick at, because
you already have the smell of it all: the ancient air pockets
in your bone mean you feel the edible, apart from the must-leave-it-be,
and you know the enticing fear-odor wafting up from the dark
under a porch means there’s a whole colony of velvet-soft babies beneath,
rabbit or cat or mole, means that waiting is almost always fruitful,
as is resting in the sun which kills the micro-annoyances
that wish to nest among your feathers—hah! as if!—but are instead
expelling their rough genetic hopes out of their sack-coats to die
under the beautiful radiation some call Spring but you call life.
~~
Well, there you go. Hawk-On-The-House isn’t the kinder-gentler bird you might find in a child’s picture book. The picture above isn’t the clearest, but it shows our neighborhoods very own Hawk. On a house, of course.