Knife

Something just now moved through my heart like the thinnest of blades as that red-tail pumped once with its great wings and flew above the gray, cracked rock wall. It wasn't about the bird, it was something about the way stone stays mute and put, whatever goes flashing by. Sometimes, when I sit like this, quiet, all the dreams of my blood and all outrageous divisions of time seem ready to leave, to slide out of me. Then, I imagine, I would never move. By now the hawk has flown five miles at least, dazzling whoever else has happened to look up. I was dazzled. But that wasn't the knife. It was the sheer, dense wall of blind stone without a pinch of hope or a single unfulfilled desire sponging up and reflecting, so brilliantly, as it has for centuries, the sun's fire.