Poems by Kevin Swanwick

Our Only Air

by Kevin Swanwick

From Canary Spring 2021

Kevin lives within the Lower Hudson River watershed between the Hudson and the Shawangunk Kill, a few miles from 600-acre Shawangunk Grasslands wildlife refuge, which he visits every week to monitor the visitations of Northern Harrier Hawks and Short-eared Owls (November to March) and a wide variety of birds during the rest of the year.

We are sharing the air here & there
you on the craggy arm of a tall black locust &
me on the morning ground.
When I think of travel I think of crafted roads.
But then you soar
feathery arms dihedral with rufous tail trailing
catching swells of sky on delicate spirals of spring breath
moving up & then downward falling forward
led by a silent stare that peers through the brisk gales
that act out this morning’s airy high.
Swooping incognito you invent the look of a spy undetected
as we share our secret alone.
I inhale this air & return it in short order parsed with
metered breaths that push each other aside
rising & falling over a grid that my feet can slip through.
When I try to read the motioned map of jubilant gusts you commandeer
dividing bursts & swirls that give no sign of pause
you offer your back in full extent to my grubby eyes before that
feinted flight vanishes with a turning halt & you bare
a tawny breast with rusted tail lowered like a stylus making ligature behind
your curved sharp beak plunging to the rye-grass field
where gravity as guilty bystander watches the dive ending in a death stroke.
The meadow vole is showered in shade by the final flush
of your wings, its last measure of sun seen before the four-talon strike
empties life into the air—our air—enclosed in your dangled cage.
If I were Icarus, I’d follow you to that raised station overlooking our air & its
subject ground. I’d seek answers to my questions of flight & those
of observed earth keenly watched at far range—the ones that travel the world
on behalf of voles & persons in search of the truth about whether or
not we’d take every last one & leave a barren field below our only air.