It is in the half light that you awaken
…………as at the end of an age, spread your feathers,
sift the dusky air with tips of your wings,
…………and move into the spaces of silence
clarified of the day’s blared garishness
…………—aloft, yet scouring the earth’s curvature
with such purity of intention known
…………only to those honed by hunger. In myths
you are numbered among wisdom’s children,
…………eyes like sundials, the pupils’ steel spikes
punching through to truth. But you are a hunter.
…………And the moon is the torch by which you hunt,
not a symbol of the mind sunk in depths
…………of unknowing, now rising, bathed in light
of a sudden illumination.
…………With a screech, you search out the edges of night,
read the printed tracks of nouns scampering
…………across a blank page of snow, a sentence
translated by violence into clean sound.
…………Yet tonight, wrapped in hibernal stillness
you are given to musings, querying words
…………without answer, tunneled through hollow bone.