Can You Tell How a Hawk Waits Stealthily?

The drawing of the heronry

Is ink intertwined and spooky.

In Armitage’s Poetry

Of Birds, the heron, notably,

Vouches for Hamlet’s sanity.

Old French heronçeau was subtly

Corrupted to hernshaw, duly

Thence to handsaw, and you can see

Now why Hamlet said, sensibly,

He’d notice hawks in heronries,

Places where hawks ought not to be.

You squint at the sketched, inky trees,

Whose twigs can seem like beaks and knees.

Are herons what heronries breed?

Then Anes

Things link how they want to in the woods—

You think as you think and not as you should.

The most dangerous suspicion is that

Someone who’s not like you doesn’t like you

Since they’re not like you, and maybe they don’t,

But that’s just the first step to the excuse

That you don’t need to like people like them.

Tomfoolery. Bumpy soup. Bullet-proof.

Someone touts the term, nonce. You look it up.

You’d thought of something nonce as a one-off

And it was, although also varying

Value. Every thought that you bump into

In the woods is nonce and then forgotten,

Even the thought that the way to get through

The woods must begin with an incident

(Something happens, and you write about it)

Or a phrase (you like a wording, and you

Write about it—bullet-proof bumpy soup).

You could sort a great many poems in bins

That way—triggered by phrase or incident?

What they’ve got in common is that they won’t

Happen / if you ain’t paying attention.