Premonition

That summer, the mimosa tree sickened and dropped

a shroud of wilted crowns over my father’s backyard. 

 

This was before the rain garden dug its purple thumbprint

of foxglove and thistle into the landscape, before the deer

bloodied their mouths with the last of our raspberries, before

mother and cancer rattled from my mouth on the same breath. 

 

Even when the back deck was just an outline of postholes 

and chalk, my father still hung his feeder from the dying tree

to tempt nuthatches and tanagers and the red-bellied woodpecker 

that shelled sunflower seeds in the long cinch of his beak.

 

I had just stepped from the shower when my father pounded 

on the bathroom door: come look, come quick. Sheathed 

in a bath towel, I hurried to the kitchen, saw him point

out the glass door at the hawk scattering the sparrows.

 

He clinched his talons in the woodpecker’s breast, red and deeper 

red. There was not much struggle. The long mouth gawped

as the hawk yanked feathers from its neck, plucked it alive. 

A thin moan hacked from its throat. 

Its eyes were open. 

 

I would like to tell you that I squeezed my lip between my teeth

and listened to my father when he said it was a natural cycle. 

I was sixteen, and I knew everything. I thought I understood 

 

death. I would like to tell you that I looked back at the doomed bird

and did not see the buttons of my mother’s favorite jacket 

stamped on its clouded eyes. I would like to tell you anything

 

but that, half-naked and trembling, I ran back to the bathroom 

to disappear in a cloud of steam. Anything but that four years

 

later, when my mother called and said hospice,

I knew, already, exactly what would happen.