Stone White Barbed Wire
You watched them dip and soar and sometimes they would balk, and you thought you’d see, for the first time, a hawk pounce on her prey. But they remained tall in their arcs. You returned to the woods and a hawk followed, and alighted atop a pine. You noticed a mathematical poetry to her nest, the way the branches twisted, as though the nest, or the hawk, fell under some mystical nature proportion and you remembered proportion comes from the Greek word analogia, analogy, but naming a connection between proportion and analogy makes you feel less like a poet.
That’s when you noticed barbed wire around the nest. Cut pieces. A foot in length each. You imagined the hawk stealing them from a farmer. They were rusted, blending with the branches, but the little twists and spikes were the refinement that caught your eye. You walked on. Yet the hawk’s eyes kept appearing in your head — black dots in gold. You kneeled and carved the eyes into the meat of a fallen tree as the earth sucked the tree back. Perfect circles with holes. You carved another set in a live tree, now scraping away the bark, and soon you were wandering the forest etching eyes, sometimes breasts, but usually eyes, any eyes, hawk eyes, snake eyes, deer eyes, bear eyes, spider eyes, lizard eyes. They brimmed around you in a peering sea. They were friction, heat, purpose, formations of fire to wrap the words around. The poetry came. You’d never filled so many pages.
Suddenly — it always bothers you when stories use that adverb — you heard a cry. The hawk landed on a branch before you. She opened her eyes and every eye you’d carved into the trees vanished. A fox crept from behind a trunk. She peered at you. She peered at the hawk. The fox led you to a clearing. In the middle stood a smooth white stone. The fox kicked a little dirt at the base and trotted into the trees. The hawk swooped over your shoulder, clipping your ear with her wing, and followed. The sun burnt your neck. You were alone. You touched your pen, your pages. The language never felt so slaughtered. You couldn’t remember your own name. You withdrew your machete. You pressed the blade against your wrists, your temple, your chest. You began to carve the blank white stone.
You carved a body against a burning star. In one hand he holds a pen, the other a screwdriver. He’s muscular and tattooed but his face offers no expression. His eyes are open and beaming with the glint that reflects light. You color his hair with ash. You stand back. A crowd’s formed. It’s beautiful, they say. Sacred, perfect. They push you out of the way. They give the man a name, describe the star that formed him, they fall to their knees. They sing, chant, invent a calendar, cut away trees to make more room. They arrange buildings so the windows point towards the carving. Someone collects the extra bits of stone and writes a song about them. Some sing along. Others protest. They fight. They cut away more trees. You turn. The hawk stands on the fox’s shoulders in the shadows.
