April’s warmth arrives. In the sun, the snowpack
melts. The tamped-down grass of the field beneath pokes
through enough for falcons to hunt: they’re hungry,
circling, scanning.
Soaring through the cobalt, one wheels in patient
gyres. It seeks its prey—a seed-famished mouse or
bone-thin rabbit. I can make out its feathers:
mottled and creamy,
white with specks of brown and a touch of faint gray—
poikilos, as Sappho once called such beauty.
Scholars wonder what the word means exactly:
spotted or multihued,
or intricate—a fine play of shifting
light upon the verge of what earth-bound eyes can
see, a shimmering or an iridescent
sheen that is here, then
not, just barely glimpsed or imagined, as if
beauty were beyond us at times, like apples
gleaming out of reach in the autumn sun, or
wings of spring falcons.
Tyson Hausdoerffer is Director of Western Colorado University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing. He earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, where he developed a passion for translating ancient poetry. He recently completed a verse translation of the Iliad, which seeks a publisher, and is currently working on translations of Sappho and the Odyssey.
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