The Double-Bed Dream Gallows

By Richard Brautigan
Driving through   
hot brushy country
in the late autumn,   
I saw a hawk
crucified on a
barbed-wire fence.

I guess as a kind   
of advertisement   
to other hawks,   
saying from the pages
of a leading women’s   
   magazine,

“She’s beautiful,
but burn all the maps   
to your body.
I’m not here
of my own choosing.”

Copyright Credit: Richard Brautigan, “The Double-Bed Dream Gallows” from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster. Copyright © 1968 by Richard Brautigan. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Source: The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968)