Lunch Break On The Edge of Town
By Eamon Grennan

Overhead, a mile up
from where we share
our sandwiches and soft drinks,
five slow hawks
lazily gyre on the blank
blue page of haze, loving
their air and elevation.
They see the two of us, maybe,
as the slow mobile dots
that they are, our motions
among April's tattered hedges
as otherworldy and deliberate
as theirs. Faintly
we hear the song sparrow
or the yellow warbler
lost in solitary sweetness
among the phallic cattails
behind the radio station.
Elegant as Calderwork,
the slim masts steel
to a great height, beaming
the most recent hits
into cars and flowered kitchens
all across the Valley. From
their own imponderable height
the hawks look down, their bleak
wild eyes on fire. They murmur
little gritty, companionable
queryings to one another
between deaths. We finish.
In front of the car
as we drive away,
the arch tan body of an otter —
his beige raised tail
trimmed in black — crosses
the gravelled gray road
between ditches. He bears
the light of day
at the twitching tips of his pelt
as he takes himself
delicately over a bank
beginning to green, into
the glittering familiar shadow
of his trees near water. We drive
in silence, by the first houses.