For Mack
A red-tail hawk lifts off
with a red mouth of meat
above the tarnished green
dome of the Old Observatory,
mothballed after light pollution
washed out its view into
a cosmos whose creatures
eat not meat but protein.
*
One cannot live in California unimpuned.
Here: for example, an echo from Robinson Jeffers. And allusion to a dedicatee, a dear friend who shares this space, and has skin in the game.
That Observatory is long gone, replaced by the suburban expansion in UHills. Hawks are still around.
