Devotions/Beth Kephart Poem

K. and I were talking about anxiety. I told her a story about a time, a few years ago, when the worst of it came over me, and I was saved—nothing else, just this—by the writing of poems. "Devotions" was the first poem in what became a lengthy poem cycle.

Devotions

The hawk came three months after the fox

had taken that one last lubricious

step onto my porch, a day of deer

unclasping the bracelet of themselves

across my lawn. I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t been

sleeping well, had not been on the lookout

for the hawk or for the toad, the crow, the snake

the single cricket that pulls a hawk down from the sky.

Nor for an egg; I wasn’t looking for an egg —

the mind fighting the night and at war

with the age I have become, wishing I had learned color

instead of words, but then: This hawk, with that telling

streak of rust for a tail and those four pounds

at least of bird encasing bone and soul, in the morning

in my garden, where it was late in the season and things

had turned to seed and no one, nothing but a bird and I

could guess the garden’s lore. I liked the hawk,

therefore, from the start, and I asked its name,

and it looked straight through me, for my bones

were hollow and my soul was the suggestion of insomnia,

and we were alone, besides, each on the verge of excavating

secrets but choosing to amble instead, from the garden,

across the mud pocks, toward the Japanese maple,

side by side and counting benefactions, the hawk walking

the way hawks walk, and I in devout deliverance of dawn.