Black Hills Audubon Society

Merlin (Stillaguamish Flats)
- Two Hunts -

"...and falcons fly like this..."
One hand, held high, claps with a rapid,
stiff, staccato wingbeat.
Bud Anderson

High in the spring bare cottonwood
a merlin watches - intently.
Bobs her head - fixing the distance
to her prey, then lifts
her wings and drops away.
She is dark, streaked,
flies flat and fast
into the shadows
of dairy barns,
machinery sheds.
Pigeons explode
into spring light,
their wings clacking.
A racket of blackbirds,
way up in black poplars,
stops
into silence.
She misses, circles away
over flooded pasture-lands
beating her wings like applause.

II.

Just west of here a dike divides
the pastures from the Sound,
from the tide flats.
The tide is high,
the sun is low.
A loose cloud - no -
a galaxy
of dunlin wheels,
eclipses - bird by bird -
the spackled sun,
the sun stuttering on water.
Near birds stream north,
the far birds south -
in a slow whirling,
spiral flight.
Merlin! High shadow.
Tightening in vertical tumult
the flock draws in and up
to a cumulus cloud of synchronous flashing.
We hear their thousand wings turn
at once from light to black -
their one mind conjured
by and conjuring the high,
lone hand.
She perceives, discerns,
clenches, stoops.
The flock boils and flattens out
against the flood tide, splits
in two, hisses like a sudden rain.

by Bill Yake

Bill Yake is the author of three poetry chapbooks, Confluence (Radiolarian Press, 1995), Giving Critters Short Shrift (Radiolarian Press, 1996) and The Faces of Birds (Scatter Creek Press, 1998). His poetry has also been published in Wilderness Magazine, Fine Madness, Puerto del Sol, the Seattle Review, convolvulus, and several anthologies. He has poems pending in Willow Springs and Many Mountains Moving.

Send your poetry to pelican@vei.net if you would like to publish on this page