The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Challenges
    • Challenge Archives
  • Ebooks
  • Prizes
  • Book Shelf
    • Ekphrastic Book Shelf
    • Contributors' Book Shelf
    • TERcets Podcast
  • Workshops
  • Give
  • Submit
  • Contact
  • About/Masthead

Hawk and Cardinal, by David Huddle

11/28/2017

1 Comment

 
Picture
Hawk and Cardinal, photography by David Huddle (USA). Contemporary.
Hawk and Cardinal

One  of  the  several  billion  deaths  that occurred  yesterday, 
this one more seemly than most, the photograph appalled me
after  I   realized   the  victim  was  a  cardinal. I  put   it   away,
but I  kept on seeing  it until this morning  when  the  memory
nagged  me  into  looking again. For  years  now  I’ve fed birds
in my backyard, photographed them, savored the pretty ones
like   this  lifeless   female.   This   hawk  is   just   another  bird
I’ve  fed--  this  is  how  I think  now that I  see how she turns
from what she’s killed. Dead means more to me now that I’m
well beyond my three score and ten and my mind lets me see
my human body face up, eyes closed, arms splayed out, limp
and absent from the world, senses discontinued permanently.
The  lesson   here  is   that  there  is  no  lesson.  The  world  is
is  both  cruel and kind.  Right  now  I  take  comfort  from this.

​David Huddle

David Huddle teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English and in the Rainier Writing Workshop.  His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Poetry, Shenandoah, Agni, Plume, The Hollins Critic, and The Georgia Review.  His most recent books are Dream Sender, a poetry collection, and My Immaculate Assassin, a novel.  With Meighan Sharp, Huddle has co-authored a book of poems, Effusive Greetings to Friends, forthcoming from Groundhog Poetry Press in the fall of 2017, and his new novel, Hazel, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2018. 
​
1 Comment
Garth Ferrante
11/29/2017 05:59:34 pm

This is my response both to the image and your writing:

that's not what i was thinking when i saw that image of the hawk that'd killed the cardinal...no, where you had seen the sadness in the necessity for all things to consume other things and to kill before doing so, i had instead been called back to a phone call i'd had with her brother, and it'd all been because of a different image, the one of the cover of the pisces iscariot reinterpretation by cory strand...it just made me think of her and how even after we'd broken up, i'd sometimes speak with her brother who'd looked at me as a sort older brother even though i knew we'd never be brothers the way things stood...they were done and over with the sort of finality one sees in the eyes of the one who'd said, "i love you" too many times to count, but who now looked at you like you were the very reason she was so miserable in this world and how could she ever have believed you were "the one"?...it was this one time that he and i were on the phone that i would always remember because it'd been almost a year since things had been over and there i was still asking him about her, still holding out hope that maybe she would change her mind, that maybe she'd see that i had changed because i wasn't actively pursuing her...no, i was just covertly doing so and telling him not to say anything about me asking about her...and some part of me should have felt terrible for not asking more about his life and how he was doing in high school and what his interests were and if he wanted to get together to hang out...he was only four or five years younger than i was, it wouldn't have been that big a deal, and besides, we had been as close as brothers for a little over the year she and i had been together...but no, i didn't ask more questions about him and when i did, i showed only a cursory interest because i knew that even if he and i were to be friends, how in the world was that supposed to happen with neither of us having a car or very much money and his family hating my guts?...it was just one of those doomed situations where i wanted to tell him to call me back when i wasn't a penniless loser, when i was free of my old man and was finally my own man...but, christ on the cross, just when was that going to be?...i should have told him how much he meant to me, i should've told him that he was always important because i'd always wanted a little brother like him, he had been such a good kid, and was always so pleasant to be around and there i was pumping him for information about his sister who didn't love me anymore, didn't want me anymore, and who'd moved on with her life like i knew i'd never be able to do with mine and it was all because there was something in me that was broken when it came to her: i could tell because i didn't really stop thinking about her, and i kept hoping this would change somehow, though for all my supposed creativity, i couldn't have said how they were ever going to change with her mind being completely closed off to me...she had designated me her enemy, and it was mostly my own fault because, to add insult to my own injury, i had told her i didn't want to be friends if she didn't want to be with me anymore, that it'd be too painful, that i didn't want to see her with someone else, didn't want to know she was every with someone else even though there i was adding her brother if she had a boyfriend, if she ever talked about me...it was such a pathetic display on my part that this might've been why i stopped returning his calls, and eventually after two or three more messages for me, he stopped calling altogether...but what was i supposed to say, that i really was the fucked up fiend his sister succeeded in getting the hell away from, that i was all torn up and tied up with my own problems, my own issues that would take me decades of my life to understand and several years of therapy to wrap my mind around?...was i just supposed to tell him that i wasn't yet ready to be the big brother he deserved, but would be in nearly thirty more years and to just get back to me then?...this is what i was thinking of when i saw the image of the hawk turned around completely unconcerned about the prey he'd just killed because, you know, it's not like it was going anywhere: it could afford to just look the other way and laze about before digging into its prize...i was thinking that i had killed this kid's hopes of having a relationship with a man who wasn't a drunk and who was, in his eyes maybe, a good person, or at least the kind of person he wouldn't have been mortified bringing to meet his friends...there i was asking what kind of music she listened to these days as he told me smashing pumpkins, and there he was hoping he wouldn't be the only one in a houseful of women and hoping in vain...

Reply

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    The Ekphrastic Review
    Picture
    Current Prompt
    COOKIES/PRIVACY
    This site uses cookies to deliver your best navigation experience this time and next. Continuing here means you consent to cookies. Thank you.
    Join us on Facebook:
    Picture
    Picture



    ​
    ​Archives
    ​

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015

    Lorette C. Luzajic theekphrasticreview@gmail.com 

  • The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Challenges
    • Challenge Archives
  • Ebooks
  • Prizes
  • Book Shelf
    • Ekphrastic Book Shelf
    • Contributors' Book Shelf
    • TERcets Podcast
  • Workshops
  • Give
  • Submit
  • Contact
  • About/Masthead