When Our Stories Meander, the Eagle Comes

mewling like a stone caught in a wheel,
the red-tailed hawk holds your eye
captive in its yellow one

until released, you return home, look up
what it means to be chosen by a raptor
in this exact slice of spacetime.

The bear scats berries and apple peels.
Show me the cipher that unlocks the wind
that wraps its invisible mind around

what stands immoveable. And isn’t everything
quantum jittering, seething under its skin?
Don’t say this isn’t the same story

as the snow in the heavy sky forgetting it’s fallen
for gravity, for earth and mountains and trees
time beyond remembering.

When methane plumes bubble up
from Puget Sound’s seafloor, it’s just us
grieving into the mystery,

our hands tight around earth’s tectonic plates
to keep them from wandering, only the curious
animal of ourselves peeling the bark

from black holes, dipping our fingers into the dark
and unsleepy earth to learn the ecstasy of earthworms,
hungry for illumination that won’t break ourselves.