Simulacra & Gravity

Nearby they are driving piles

into bedrock

For the new parking garage.

A red tailed hawk glides

above its shadow

Onto a roof, so strange

to the sky

I have to sit down on a bench

and watch it

Until it flies away.

It is for me like

When people woke up

on September 11^th

And didn’t believe

what they saw on TV

Because it was too much

like a movie.

This bird, so large and actual.

But even there I

have to stop because

Somehow I don’t believe

it’s real.

How could it,

Be so beautiful, so shrug

To the constant clanging

Beat back from the facades

in an echo

Of Anti-grace,

how could such a thing,

Be made of pictures

from a child’s book?

The hawk perches on a cornice

And the people walk on

Beneath its eyes. They are

beaten by the sound

Of metal, the distant apparatus

Of the pile driver

pressing claw after

Claw into bedrock.

But what is a thing

without lifting?

And after the world is covered

in structures,

And, become a presentation

Of poor Plato’s dream,

After everything is part

of the left over stage set

The hawk will look up

into the yellow light

And not be sick of it.

He will fly off and I will be

left to undertake the moment,

Dress her in burial gowns

and send her down

to read her lines before

The firing squad.

I still can’t believe t

The vastness of birds.

The great wings

and the weather,

The bending away

from the grounds,

What I know, the familiar

Crumbles back

To the ground.

:::