Carolyn Oliver

Saint Agnes Meets a Hawk on the River’s Edge

Hawk, my lamb is lost, she says.
Her voice is a piccolo the hawk
could grip between two red talons.
Where have you lost your lamb?
The rain tastes like moss and smoke.
There is nowhere I have not lost my lamb:
in forests, in caves, in dwelling places.
The river sediment, stirred, disturbed,
remembers winter. A bird in hand is worth
one bird, one bird exactly. I could be
your lamb—my feathers soft as fleece.
What’s the use in hunting through the storm?
The trees grow from their own martyrs.
Hawk is too familiar. The girl does not reply.
Or cannot. Her hair grows and grows,
enough to make a rope to the other shore,
or a nest.

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Carolyn Oliver’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in FIELD, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, Booth, Glass, Sixth Finch, Southern Indiana Review, Sugar House Review and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry and the Frank O’Hara Prize from The Worcester Review. Carolyn lives in Massachusetts with her family. Links to her writing live at carolynoliver.net.