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Bent as the wind-bleached timber

posting this belt of road, the old pair

slow down by the eagle’s nest they’ve

passed every day since it, and they,

were new, always relieved when winter

bares the great geometry of bird-craft

welded to the cottonwood

a quarter mile into the field.

The roost perseveres, cinctured

in alfalfa mown out to frozen dew.

Nothing else remains of the time when

ending’s nearness did not circumscribe

the contour of their hours. At this stage

of the game, she wonders which of them

will outlive the house paint laid on

a week before the frost.

No wing, no rustle, no flash of beak.

But eagles play for keeps. Their 

irreproachable art persists, obstinate

amalgam to the tree-stem. She knows

that nothing lasts, yet cannot yield

when lasting goes so wrong. Fifty years in,

she still waits for marriage to reveal itself,

feet banked like broken shale lining

the creek bed, worn down to shards and built

up again when the tide carries in its young.

Peacock Journal, December 2018