Collected Poems by Marie Ponsot

Author:Marie Ponsot [Ponsot, Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

IN ABEYANCE

The day of the transit of raptors

happens every September along

the Hudson airlane or updraft;

bird-watchers set a month’s mind for it.

No joiner, I’d never joined them

but today from dawn to twelve

high on Hook Mountain I took among friends

with windbreakers cameras binoculars

a watch at a station between fake owls

hoisted on posts facing north & west

to lure the sharp-shins in.

We had the luck to watch

over a hundred (a Cooper’s, two marsh, a kettle

of fifty beyond the Tappan Zee); we spent

hours of disembodiment, selves tossed out to vision,

angels in our abeyance, taking gift as title. Tired,

I cased the glasses, ate apples & sandwiches,

lay supine on warm noon rock out of the wind

to magnify sleep with praises of lenses

and woke gasping at shouting, It can’t be! It was,

was fluency, inverse above us for hours,

a river swimming with flying a mile deep

among the invisible: all otherness:

affluence: as twelve thousand

hawks went over, broad-winged

(an eagle among them, osprey also)

the one species mostly; I saw them,

their undulance communal, some

dropping awhile a quarter-mile afloat

then pulsing up again deep.

Hawks

splash difference on the visible the

virtual the not-so sky,

displaying the shaping of air

as they plunge up, into out-of-touch, or

as aloft they liquidly

maintain their openness

fully extended to a rest

that rides deeper in the cells

than sleep or than most desire gratified.

There they take their distance

and a stillness to see it in

that I will die knowing nothing inward of.

They know one thing: when.

Days dangle for them, dipping

down & up, then dip less & less

& slow, till left sun & right storm

halt at a balance, & ten thousand

high nests empty as all leap

forward southward from & to

the when of equilibrium.

Together they ebb from us, emigrant,

their perspective on or in

the now of air, transfiguring.

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