Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

Our Hawk

It was the summer the hawk
hung around. I might not
have noticed if I didn't watch
birds a lot, but this one
was hard to miss-soaring
and cree-ing, then dropping
below the canopy of the big trees
along the creek.

I started seeing it perched,
sitting still, everywhere-
in the dead elm,
on the power line out back,
then even on the railing
half-way up the front steps.
Not scared, not moving
until I got out of the car.

It was the summer friends fell
left and right, near and far.
Sharon and Tony's cancer came back.
Karen and Barb's T cells turned
on them. I stayed on hold
with Mayo, MGI and NeoRx
searching for new drugs,
clinical trials, for anything at all.

And all summer, hawk kept watch.
I knew it was just learning to hunt-
replacing youth with practice-
trying to catch the next rat or vole
over and over again.
Still, hawk taught, "Pay attention!"
Every day, it drew sharp lines
in the air around the territory

---

we shared, defended it,
kept us safe by killing
all the dirty little creatures
crawling toward us, one
after another, that we could never
spot or stop in time.

---

 
One Page

Walking east on Murray Street
four blocks north of Ground Zero
in a sour, smoky wind,
I watch workers hose off windows.
"God Bless American" is smeared
on the hood of a smashed car
abandoned in a tiny lot
by a closed bar.

Then I see some sheets of paper
caught under a chainlink fence-
not just deli wrappers or handbills-
but book pages, loose as dead leaves.
I pick one up. It's from the end
of a law book. The edges are gone,
not burned, but sheared,
punched out of the volume
with every other page by a wave
of awful force.

It's partly coated
with a gray crust from the walls
and shelves that held it up
in a library in the sky, gone now
like the doomed volumes
of Alexandria or Atlantis.

So I stand there in the cold
holding a relic as delicate
as any parchment or papyrus scroll.
I want to be its curator-
clean it, make repairs,
find its mates and bind them all
back into a book again.

But instead I just open my hand
and it is gone, turning, spinning up
Lost in one gritty gust.

---

 
Rendezvous

In the room with the wood stove
we gather around the lost library table,
pass recent chardonnay, salmon
cooked with hot coals
and maple smoke, peaches
from the neighbor's trees,
too much tobacco.

Again, we gently loosen the roots
and comb the branches of our family trees,
find fallen fruit, cut bark
and fresh new growth:
children and books out
of the nest, jobs that need us,
partners true at last.

We've stopped waiting
for big breaks, know how
the little ones add up
into six lives spent
mostly in art, sometimes
at our best.

Outside, fall colors peak
along with all the other signs
of closure, like old silver plate
we know too well
won't feed the guests
next year.

Inside, we divide trade goods-
new poems and addresses-
then rise at last
to fact the road:
a bark basket of moss
and embers held close
under our coats
to start up the fire at home.

---

Warren Woessner was born in 1944 at New Brunswick, New Jersey and grew up in a farm town in southern New Jersey. Woessner received his A.B. degree in 1966 from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1971 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Before taking up the practice of law he was a Senior Research Scientist (1972-1978) with Miles Laboratories in Madison, Wisconsin. He is a founding partner of Schwegman, Lundberg, Woessner & Kluth P.A. (SLWK), a Minneapolis  based law firm specializing in intellectual property law.
In 1968, Woessner with James Bertolino, founded Abraxas, an independent small press and poetry journal. Woessner was also a founder of WORT-FM (Madison, Wisconsin) and hosted the station's poetry and fiction program, "Visitors from Inner Space."
Woessner's poetry, widely anthologized, includes the following chapbooks and collections: The Forest and the Trees: Poems (Quixote Press, 1968), The Rivers Return (Gunrunner Press, 1969), Inroads: Poems (Modine Gunch Press, 1970), Cross Country: Poems (Quest Publications, 1972), Landing (Ithaca House, 1973), Lost Highway (College of the Mainland, 1977), No Hiding Place (Spoon River Poetry Press, 1979), Storm Lines: A Collection of Poems (New Rivers Press, 1987), Clear to Chukchi: Poems from Alaska (Poetry Harbor, 1995), Iris Rising (BkMk Press, 1998), Chemistry, A Poem (Pudding House Publications, 2002), Our Hawk (The Toothpaste Press, 2005).
The poems here are from Warren Woessner's latest chapbook, Our Hawk (The Toothpaste Press, 2005) and appear here with the permission of The Toothpaste Press.