Taking Flight

A person, being of cosmic origin, can become one with a star.
— Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, A Treatise on Stars

Every day I see a hawk. Except recently I learned that some of these birds aren’t hawks after all. I live, like all of us, in an ecotone. In mine, red-shouldered hawks perch on pine branches and lamp posts, vigilant as cats. Or, they wheel above palm trees, wings lit with crescents and half-moons. What I thought were tiny hawks on telephone wires are actually kestrels, keeping watch over a field and its shadows. From the ground looking up, they appear the size and shape of songbirds but sharper, the difference between a spoon and a knife. So, I should amend my beginning, because sometimes I see hawks; sometimes kestrels; sometimes black vultures, tattered as pirate sails; sometimes ospreys, pulling fish from ponds; and sometimes swallow-tailed kites, though only from afar, delicate as fabric scissors trimming blue cotton. Sometimes I don’t see but hear the barred owls’ ghostly chatter from the thick, tropical woods behind someone else’s home.

Every day I sense a bird of prey.

This summer I re-read , the 2016 book by British naturalist and historian Helen Macdonald. It’s a resplendent, sad, and genre-bending book about training a goshawk, about another writer who wrote a doomed book about training a goshawk, about grief and love. But mostly, it’s about wonder. Macdonald’s prose is burnished, as though written in scrolls. I see colors in her words, hidden and layered; in gray there is slate, raincloud, smoke, pepper, flint, chalk, pewter, ash, colors within colors, refracting cathedrals of gray. She writes about light in a house, how it’s solid as glass. She writes about a goshawk’s startled eyes, “the colour of sun on white paper,” how they stare “because the whole world had fallen into them at once.” I needed this book again to help me