2008B FRQ #1

 HAWK ROOSTING 

 GOLDEN RETRIEVALS 

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. 

Inaction, no falsifying dream 

Between my hooked head and hooked feet: 

Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat. 

5 The convenience of the high trees! 

The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray 

Are of advantage to me;

And the earth’s face upward for my inspection. 

My feet are locked upon the rough bark. 

10 It took the whole of Creation

To produce my foot, my each feather: 

Now I hold Creation in my foot 

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly— 

I kill where I please because it is all mine. 

15 There is no sophistry in my body: 

My manners are tearing off heads— 

The allotment of death. 

For the one path of my flight is direct 

Through the bones of the living. 

20 No arguments assert my right: 

The sun is behind me. 

Nothing has changed since I began. 

Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention 

seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so. 

Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh 

joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then 

5 I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue 

of any thrillingly dead thing. And you? 

Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk, 

thinking of what you never can bring back, 

or else you’re off in some fog concerning 

10 —tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work: 

to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving, 

my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark, 

a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here, 

entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow. 

—Mark Doty 

Copyright © 1998 by Mark Doty. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

My eye has permitted no change. 

I am going to keep things like this. 

—Ted Hughes 

From Lupercal, by Ted Hughes. Faber & Faber Ltd., 1960.