The osprey slakes her cravings
On the dirk of a high crag
In that eyry tangle
The bone breaker’s lilac eggs
Ripen under her breast

Dark quills
Write in languages
And melodies long since lost
Indecipherable markings
Mapped in some vast
Expanse and suspended
Over ridge and rock
Cliff and bank
A wild place where
No one sleeps

The air is light
Some stroking thing
Is pent up under the eking tide
Which never quiets itself
Though it rocks incessantly

Instruction comes
Through the pillaging osprey
Whose lightning strike
Plunges, pocketing into the sea,
Emerges with squirming catch
And rises up
To pinnacle
The secret away

Brutal climber
Under the shadowy sky
Tear the trap away
Loose the long shadowed larch
Its pillar rots

Under the afflicted tree
The last quill falls
And August rides
The clouded sky
To a cornered world

The fish bellies up to the sun
Under the osprey’s wing.
Do not regret the deep
The cold and wild,
Where the rocks quiver,
The outspread beach wisps away.

No beauty lacks savagery,
Flinging itself,
Willing sacrifice,
Scattering the stalking prey,
Breaking only the wind.

Tortured on the low slope
Thick upon the briar,
A golden sun kisses the earth,
Bricking the friable loam,
Casting the badger’s den,
Kilning its burrow.

A heart loathes the common grain.
Piece by piece,
Under the spirit of the world,
It chokes and twists
To reconcile the soft lilac of the egg
And the predator’s talon.