What Bird
A kite hawk, white crown with raisin eyes, shows up in the neighbor’s tree, screaming from her tips. Below her winter exposes itself in flat, wet grass and leafless twigs. Every few hours she turns desperate circles. Sometimes she’s strong and expanding with a penetrating cry. Other times she drifts down, like dirty, falling snow, hollow, hopeless. I think she’s casting for her baby. Maybe he’s lost on the ground; maybe he fell; maybe he left her. I feel her pain in the back of my groin. It goes on for days; wavering in the wind, through the window. Her screams sit on my pillow, my coffee table, on the rim of my sink. I let them because it’s less haunting than the quiet in my house. I get the step stool and hunt the binoculars from the shelf above my daughter’s empty clothing rod. I watch the hawk until my arms grow so heavy I rest them on the tops of the fence boards. At night, I lay in bed and listen for morning to yell through the curtains. A week later, the morning is silence. Overnight ice forms on the fence. The tree is an empty skeleton. I knock on the neighbor’s door. Perhaps she fell. Perhaps they saw her leave. Perhaps they saw her fledgling return. They look at me sideways, two babies on their hips and say: What bird?
