In upstate New York one time, Annie and I
had fallen and fallen in love with the hawks up there.
They're very beautiful hawks, red-tailed hawks they have,
and we met a man there named Dr. Heinz Meng, who
is a student of hawks.
And he's devoted his life to birds,
but he's especially interested in hawks.
And we hadn't realized how extraordinarily beautiful
they are.
We use them as a metaphor for some things
that are kind of confusing, but the creatures themselves--
we've seen many of them flying.
We never saw this, but he had after he
had made a film of hawks exchanging prey in midair.
Everybody has to live.
He was, of course, a Darwinian, and he loved the creatures.
Sometimes I think that people who sentimentalize animals
secretly hate them.
I hadn't realized that before.
He loved the creature so much.
This is a poem about seeing two of the hawks.
"You and I Saw Hawks Exchanging the Prey"
"They did the deed of darkness in their own mid-light.
He plucked a gray field mouse suddenly, in the wind.
The small dead fly alive helplessly in his beak,
his cold pride, helpless.
All she receives is life.
They are terrified.
They touch.
Life is too much.
She flies away sorrowing.
Sorrowing she goes alone.
Then her small falcon, gone.
Will not rise here again.
Smaller than she, he goes, claw beneath claw
beneath needles and leaning boughs,
while she, the lovelier of these brief, differing two,
floats away sorrowing, tall as my love for you,
and almost lonelier.
Delighted in the delighting, I love you in mid-air,
I love myself the ground.
The great wings sing nothing lightly.
Lightly fall."