Buzzard

I had taken him to his mother

and was returning along the D8.

In the breakdown lane several cars, and behind them

scattered papers like a snail’s track.

I thought about how many things

it is possible to learn: to speak again, to use your legs

instead of your hands, to let yourself like a newt

grow joy inside your body,

tissue to tissue, joyfully linked cells.

Like a table cleared with a sleeve, the empty highway

signaled that the healing time

would be written with a tiny pinkish scar

into the calendar of memory.

And then – I saw it out of the corner of my eye,

like someone indicating an attack

and a shadow passed perilously

like a startled doe –

a falling buzzard, rotating, like when a plane’s engine

cuts out, and then crashes

into the azure highway

somewhere far behind the car.

I imagine that disheveled remnant,

collapsed into itself upon the merciless surface,

as if it still didn’t know how to fly,

chilled in her meager nest

and she watched that blue above her,

predatory head adamantly lodged

between two wings whose tips

are ruffled by the breeze like a promise...

I watch behind me as her bird body

calms in quivers, the wind ruffling her again

as it slowly dissolves

like sleep.

Source: A Secret Life, translated by Nathan Fields. (Blue Diode Press, 2021)