I follow a female
falcon, north, upbeach.
Dark, uncommon, the books says,
uncommon as me being here
to witness the sun and sky
in tandem bluing the waking
waters of the ocean out
past its mouth of foam
on a day of almost January.
The small falcon sits unmasked
atop one, and, upbeach,
another knob of graying wood.
She’s small against
a vastness of gritty,
high-tide soaked sand. She
perches close to the tideline
and waits.
She waits for me,
her morning’s interruption.
When I finally understand
this waiting I obediently
sit and call the dog to me.
Then she commences
to eat the foaming whiteness
of the snowy plover whose body
she had hugged as she
flew low and heavy along
the drying pendants of the shore
during her waiting.
Watching her pull legs
and feathers from the body
I saw blood sparkle
on her speckled chest
where the stains of centuries
have linked her
a gleaming necklace
and I felt a channel of hunger
surge from an empty riverbed
inside me from before
the time my dry mouth
claimed it would not eat
meat I could not kill myself.
Here at the glinting pendulum
of the ocean I almost could
if I could grip a log
with my back to the swinging
doorway of the sea
and tug at the reddening remnants
of the foaming crests of waves
with the yellow arrow of my mouth.
If this was a fable
the ocean might swallow
the humble yellow thought
that is the kill.
If this was a photograph
it would take away
a brittle, curling ribbon to taste
the staining feathers
of a cloud of shorebirds
rising,
they think,
for the incoming tide.
This poem first appeared in Bards West, An Anthology of Poetry (Local Gems Press, 2024).
—
Jackie McClure writes poetry and fiction aiming to illuminate commonplace segments of our shared landscapes. She would almost always rather be swimming but when rooted on land she can often be found walking the hills and shores of the Cascadia bioregion near the Salish Sea in the northwest corner of Washington State where she lives. Recent work has been published in Humana Obscura, Wild Roof Journal, and Penumbra.
