. . . for my grandchildren

the echo of everything that has ever

been spoken

still spinning its one syllable

between the earth and silence

    W.S. Merwin, "Utterance"

The days growing shorter now I awaken before dawn, and only a little early light is possible this morning where fog and dew-drench envelop the near pines, all sense of distance foreshortened into a nearness of emptiness that is something like looking down into a deep canyon, a long moment that is almost vertigo, a fear of falling.

                                       pines hidden in fog

                                       nothing stirs in the stillness

                                       even I'm not here

and then I am fully present in what I cannot see but know is the cry of an eagle, who has never come in the fall but every spring stays for an hour,  sitting in the same bough of the same oak before moving on to the ancient nesting ground on bluffs above the river.  A thousand years ago the Illini Indians made their religion  of the eagles there, painting on the bluffs their Piasa Bird, "as large as a calf with horns like a deer, red eyes, a beard like a tiger's, a face like a man, the body covered with green, red and black scales and a tail so long it passed around the body, over the head and between the legs," according to Father Jacques Marquette's journal, the first white man to see it.  And perhaps what I hear now is not the voice of an eagle but the story of a people and the bird who inspired their beliefs, going on across all those years like the light of a star no longer there, the endless retelling becoming part of my own story.