Breakdown

by Malcolm Winsom

Even when he's caught in the tall grasses, great wings flapping in a truncated and ineffectual way, the red-tailed hawk looks noble. It's that hawk face. It's capable only of nobility. It's frozen in nobility. It's trapped in nobility forever. Even its denuded skull is noble.

He could be pushing madly on a door that says "Pull" and still he'd look noble. He could be blind stumbling drunk and blubbering about Kierkegaard, trying to buy drinks for the house with a Sears card, and still he'd look noble. What a responsibility! All that hawk angst and

no way to let it show. He sees green and shadow all around him in the tall grasses, and it's beautiful, it's his world, this place, this green and shadow, where the mice run, and high above, a swath of gray-blue, and it's beautiful, it's his world, too, and he flaps his great

wings, and flaps his great wings, and flaps, and flaps, and it's all ineffectual, that flapping, and there he is, in his world, with the running mice, the green and shadow, and he's hoping (I know this) for the winsome, worried, resigned mask of the dreamer, Oh hell,

caught in the tall grasses, again! Will my troubles never cease?

Malcolm Winsom lives in Ireland with fourteen cats, a parrot he calls Fred, a Corgi called Merlin, and a buxom, agreeable woman named Irene. He has been publishing poetry for nearly fifty-five years and declares that he will publish it for another fifty-five years if the world situation allows.