THIS WILD FLAME

17 minutes into a 30-minute backroad commute. 17 minutes into a driving rush of Misfits, Fugazi, Dead Kennedys, and Operation Ivy. Fog like soup, like over-applied gouache, has erased the expanse I know by heart. Rolling fields, vineyard rows, the lake a sprawl between hardwood acres blanketing rolling hills. Normally, the music matches my speed. Matches the almost-frantic pace of passing landscape. Telephone poles, fenceposts, homesteads, ponds, abandoned farm implements, hedgerows, country cemetery headstones, mailboxes all keep time. But this morning, 17 minutes into a 30-minute backroad commute, discord. Furious energy into a void. Baseline, guitar, kickdrum, cymbal, and landscape unsyncopated, jarring.

I crest a rise, blind even under clear conditions. A red-tailed hawk stands on a kill — a rabbit — immediately in my lane. Talons gripping the body, brown-gold-cream-speckled chest full, head high, dark eyes defiant. His entire being saying, Fuck you, this is mine, just before he disappears with a sickening thud beneath my sight. No flinch. No contraction of muscles or dipping its head into its shoulders in preparation for jumping into flight. Only defiance. The punk rock nature of the hawk is not lost on me.

The poet, William Stafford, found a deer, a pregnant doe, dead on the side of a narrow road one night, and contemplated his place in the unnatural order of life and death as he pushed her into the river from the road. “My only swerving,” he said. Standing fifty feet behind my truck on the shoulder in the gauzy morning, mourning the loss of this wild flame, I curse how unnecessarily, inadvertently huge I am in this world. How much more I need to mind the deliberate range of my volume. Stafford’s swerve contemplated death. Mine, defiantly, life. I move the hawk and its prey to the dignity of tall grass beyond the shoulder.