plain china: Best Undergraduate Writing 2009

Red-Tailed Hawk, Road 198

---

by Elizabeth Krause

Any given day, you might find me there,
pulled on
to the slanted shoulder;

Yes, in manner of all wingless beings, I envy the flight
that sleeps easy in this raptor’s bones,
the taloned grip she has on her own transcendency.
But it is her feather-spine focus,
the way she waits as though time limits her less
than gravity, that stops me—
how she hunts sometimes by staying just this side
of still, liquid tilt of head, shift of eye,
movements subtle as a signature’s unique slope and curl.

When I stop to watch her
not blink,
not fidget,
not question,
I want to fit and rest inside my hunger like a red-tailed hawk
to peer through mist and grass
and find the thing that feeds me.