I Found you up on Dartmoor

quivering like a tense arrow, 

I think I see a kestrel up on 

longaford tor. 

it is not 

innate, this private familiar. 

there was a time when 

you were at best a pigeon 

caught against a gust that 

my childhood eyes called a gale, 

learning that in the bird’s 

still-fleeting is a feeling 

close like a memory. 

at age maybe-five, we trenched 

the wheat fields to the thames, 

my hand in your enormous Nanny hand. 

we must have planted our feet 

in the path’s new concrete – 

i only remember that still 

distance of us from ourselves 

and the upwards peel of eyelids, 

when I started to: look Nanny, 

that bird

is stuck 

in the sky. 

the wind is 

so strong 

it can’t 

move. 

and you No, she’s not actually. [smiling]

She’s a kestrel, you see how 

She beats the air to stay 

Perfectly still, 

Just watching. 

then thuds loose 

 tears that come before the plummet of kestrel 

mourning hell heaped onto a vole 

in the bloody sunshine of gorse 

         the flights, the arrow, the heavy onto earth