So It Goes

That marsh hawk, its blown-leaf flight across Tomales Bay fog, summer’s abraded light, the Pacific tide pressuring and squeezing wave on wave into the bay’s pinched inlet. . . We feel somehow between us still water crushed by that sea, so constant it seems not to be. The hawk, a circus, tumbles, stops, stands upon the air, beats its wings as if to shoo the sun’s drenched veils, and its clapping wings stop our unstoppable argument, that love goes, who knows why, and delivers us from pain to pain, air with teeth that seems to eat more air. Northern harrier, owl face, they sea-changed your name, who listens with your face and shows not love but want, speed, life in flight toward, forever toward, pausing at every chance to use what ocean-born bayside air sustains you by resisting you. We thank your sunken head bones and wild close-to-water seeking that somehow speaks to us, delivers us to another amazed agonized place.