A few things I’ve learned—when a tree erupts
in bird noise, a predator is near.
The hawks prefer the higher branches, often
just sit—a quarter of an hour even,
waiting their moment, and then it comes,
gorgeous flare—feathers unreeling,
scalloped, dark, edged with pale cutlasses,
crescent moons. We pass a dead crow beset
by snails—surreal and grotesque,
that muffled bird shape.
Who knew snails could get so ravenous?
Even the local pond I used to think of as calming
erupts when I toss my crumbs across it
—turtles, eels, fish whose fins
though small, appear tough, razored;
all of them eating, the bread, each
other, a quotidian object lesson
in brutality, though for us
it isn’t just to kill and eat—which seems
cleaner somehow, but the complicated
dance of siphoning power.
Unfair to think such thoughts when
the sky is so summer blue, a pool one might
fall headlong into—indigo, cloud.
What did words ever do but dice into pieces?
I think this, dragging my lame foot, noticing how
a few others stare at me—that calm hostile stare
that seems to say “you should not be here,
you who are not like us.”
The speed of the caracara as it descends—I’ve
watched it this week two or three times,
savage and beautiful or beautiful
and savage. I cannot decide which.
I am part the mouse running across the
vacant lot—that desperate body
possessed by the wings which
shadow it. What does the caracara think?
Its eyes are level, it appears
possessed entirely by the sky.

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Sheila Black is the author of five poetry collections and three chapbooks. Her latest, For the Loneliness of Walking Out, is newly released from Lily Review Poetry Books (Spring, 2025). Her poems and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Crab Creek Review, Poetry, The Nation, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She lives in San Antonio, TX and Tempe, AZ where she is the Assistant Director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University (ASU).

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