Hawk-Watchers

There must be a collective noun

for hawk-watchers on a mountain.

Drove? Paddling? Sloth? Bask? Clowder?

Mostly men in late middle age,

beards and baseball caps, sporting

binoculars and spotting scopes

worth more than my house. We note

their focus, their fixation on dots

barely discernible from cloud

above the gloomy neighboring peak.

You’re impressed that they believe

that at such terrible distance

they can sort broad-shouldered

from red-tail hawk. You admit

you can hardly tell a hawk from

a handsaw, but we agree that

effete literary allusions

have no place amid the krummholz

and exposed granite ledge,

no currency with hawk-watchers

guzzling bottled water and gazing

into the misty ephemera

to mark their count on the board.

I’m surprised to see osprey

listed among the aeronauts

counted for the sake of counting.

You’re startled to note peregrines

among the various raptors,

since you thought them European.

We’re all friends in the bird-world,

fellow travelers in the blue.

That blue today is cloud-marbled

with an elegant texture absorbing

the long arcs of flight. The shadows

cast by the clouds shuffle across

the wooded landscape below us.     

We agree that even combined

our eyesight wouldn’t allow us

to join the count. Eleven hundred

birds so far this season, each

a construction so elaborate

nothing human can approach it,

our most agile acts of intellect

still falling well short of flight.