chased them from tree to tree
across the old county land,
hiking the swales and ridges
and river bottom, the
gardens where Hmong women
bend among cabbages and
cucumber vines and scarecrows
made of tin cans and rags
fluttering in the wind.
We walked among seasons,
among lost orphan graves
as we followed the dark
birds and their lonely flights,
the slow drift from oak to oak,
and passed under their stoic
judgment, as cold and silent
as our father's eyes.
We clawed through raspberry
brambles, fields of milkweed
and burrdock while hawks circled
overhead, flashing their red
tails as we prayed, held hands
and kissed, poked through the brush
to pester field mice and
startle philosophical woodchucks.
Along the train track, we
harvested opossum skulls laughing,
a deer head severed by some poacher,
a stash of apricot schnapps,
hypnotized by the sun's gleam
in the steel rails before the old
diesels lugged coal and scrap
from the village -- we were
blind to the hawks' prescience --
it was always life and death,
always the great fear, always
the promise of redemption
vanishing. For months
machines have scraped that land,
torn up and denuded history,
defaced the language, and the hawks,
seeking kinship of wisdom
and human wreckage, have
flown west to the land of
memory and dying, where,
we know, all of this somehow
started, and we wound up here,
instead.
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