ALASTAIR MORRISON

Witness

There’s an eagle. That at first is all
I’m offered, on the phone at brunch. It’s nesting
on the north shore. Here she pauses.
Andy and Michelle have seen it twice.
It’s been decades. Two babies. Eaglets,
she corrects herself, half shy. My mother knows
                                      I hear the hunger
for any slow-returning grandeur.

Another month. I’m home in the old house.
At night the pine planks croak in continence.
In daylight someone with a loud machine
obsessively rejuvenates a lawn.
I stare at clouds like cows in fields of cows.
Kindling sits the stove like oracle bones.
One day, in its own time, out in the boat,
there comes the cruciform rebuke, aloof,
the lonely hunter’s silhouette.
As if I had refused belief in it.