Osprey Shadow

All morning I saw the osprey shadow
move across the groundcover beneath me
as I raked out the overgrowth:
Faded plastic wrappers, a deflated ball and what else…
Nubs of green.

                        Something was happening for the osprey
Maybe the fledglings were off. Or is it that guarding
has more to do with giving wide berth
to a little thing?

                             One poet says that artists
are lost to moderation, half of us anyway.
And it is true. I worry about all of the things
I am not yet to the world.

                                              But the way the osprey shadow races
over me and races over the yard
brings me back
to what it is
to be looking down
at the figure which is moving
overhead.

*

What was the raccoon doing in the middle of the day?
What any mother would do.
I stopped the car for her to cross the road
And for my children to see.


                              What the raccoon was doing
was carrying a rat, no, a cub,
her runt in her mouth
across the road to another place.


More cars stopped to watch her bush herself up
and lope down the embankment
where skunk cabbage, faded catsup pouches
and damp light meant some kind of end for her.

 

We moved on to swim lessons.
I forgot by dinner.

*


And                             there was a swan hit in the next town over.
It was found walking down Main Street, concussed
and hissing with a sideways slurr.
I do not know If it bled
and who can say if there were stars
behind the closed eyes of its knocked head
but the story alone
made me think of public pain
and how the swan, once struck,
headed right for the traffic of witnesses
like Can you behold me
of this trauma?
Can you behold me of this?

*

We had a possum dead
for several days by the road in front of our house,
and we never knew it
until the neighbor came by to say
He had noticed it for days.
I felt so ashamed
that there are peripheries
of me, unknown.
Stories,
Down the embankments,
New stillnesses—


Like me once. But I was made lucky—
shimmied myself up as I did from the blown out windows
of my flipped car
with only a split lip
and that was it.
The silence down the gully in the snow
I filled
unknowingly
With my children’s father’s name
And god’s

*

I looked up to the osprey.
Her cry as distinct as the kettle.
There was urgency in her wings.

                                    Is someone, aside from me,
Looking up to her and wanting to know what to do
and wondering how to witness?

*

What was drawn by her in the elipse of her shadow
May be the shape of shepharding come over me.

                                    What do you, Osprey, see above me that I don’t
and am not equipped to see
By palm or lip or eye?

                                          I know there are orbs of stars behind you
And there is a slight arc to the ground I am on.
I know the hollow part of your flight feather
Is called the calamus.
It is a stalk without barb.
It is a quill
And can be cut at an angle
filled with ink
And used to write.

                               I know that the poet, who in the same poem
wrote that we are lost to moderation,
wrote too that she wanted to make of her whole life
only a few wild stanzas.

I know, Osprey, I want to make of my whole life
a widening gyre of something akin to wings
or shadows of wings.

_________
Alison D. Moncrief Bromage‘s debut poetry collection Daughter, Daedalus won the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry from Truman State University Press. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Barrow Street, Denver Quarterly and elsewhere. She works at Yale University and lives in Stony Creek, CT with her husband, two kids, bees, chickens and cat.