A Slant of Certain Light
illuminates the daunting acme of heaven’s gilded vaults,
as winnowing through great blank spaces,
dappled shafts of a soot-grimed sky, unmarred by nostalgia or regret
plunges the peregrine falcon.
She is cerulean agency on the wing, ubiquitous death
tumbling toward an anxious and unsettled world.
In her focused lens shines sentience—a restive promise,
steeled tension of things about to chance.
Some hold her alar flight, embellished by invocation’s
piercing scream,
is a sextant guiding more laborious patterns we hold
against the jealous pull of gravity;
that she carries on her pinioned descent primordial,
nebular stardust;
that she is Divinity ascending each spring on earnest columns
of mounting air that abide no sin;
that the stunning panoply of shadow-light from windswept billows
presages the encroachment of deeper, more lasting dusks.
But our paralytic stasis, the absence of any precise measure, blinds us
to the truth she exacts
from her imposing summits: A swift congruence of talon-sharp veracity
with a pigeon’s nadir—unspoken accord
decided in convolutions of spiraling velocity, blood-stippled down
drifting earthbound in silent reverence.
Her exploits thus appeal most forcibly to her own keen eye, her dim form
yet receding with the light.
| Gina Marie Bernard |
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