Brevity no matter how beautiful

Nothing Answers

Nothing answers a hawk. She lets loose in dry typhoons
to whool and skirl in a ringed vernacular that only other
stripes may understand, choosing no answer. My oaks
have heard it all before. The egg came after the acorn
as the god came after the man. The bird leaves her name
for the wind to carry some place she can never wing to.

I open my sliding door and the sound scrapes her off the
branch. There may be feathers left for my finding, some
small trespass we mutually excuse so that one might seek
the other, some answer being better than none at all. In
this do we find our small trophies, the dropped quills
fanned in a vase on a sill in Santa Fe, sacrificed reminders



that everything here is bound by brevity no matter how
beautiful. She lets again and again there comes no answer.
She is somewhere higher now, circling under things that
themselves circle beneath other circles we pattern ourselves
with. From this distance, she might be a quilt of grand design,
a deeper fill unforeseen in the grandeur of purpose. She calls

again and again nothing answers a hawk. Mourning doves
coo the shaded ground as quail stand vigil against rapture
from a sky come flighted with cinnabar talons and red
consequences. When she calls, lie mute, motionless, for
she will have you for her own. Do this if you wish to remain
footheld; if you’ve no desire to learn what question she posed.

Joseph Gallo
July 13, 2009