Two Poems by Daniel Donaghy

Two Poems: Daniel Donaghy

eagles with Eaglets on Webcam

—Decorah, Iowa*

I’d seen the steel stares of broken-winged rescues on zoos’ stripped branches and birch boughs, and cartooned versions of their spread wings and fearsome faces in silhouette on football helmets and sweatshirts and faded car trunk magnets, and I’ve marveled at photos in which they glide

stiff-winged across blue-blurred western skies and swoop down talus slopes to snatch in their talons salmon and suckers with a grip ten times stronger than a man’s, but until my daughter sent me a link to a webcam watching a mother and father nurse their just-hatched babies in a windstorm, I’d never seen a bald eagle’s fierceness displayed as love. In five minutes, I’ll teach Contemporary Poetry. She’ll log in to Psychology of Infants and Toddlers.

For the past year, her college has been her room, my classroom the basement, my students Zoom boxes of names, most without faces, their cameras turned off,

DANIEL DONAGHY

mics muted until I open the day’s breakout rooms. No one cares anymore, my daughter says. Everyone’s just numb. Moving from group to virtual group, I watch them

start each discussion awkwardly as if waking in fog, logged into school from their kitchens and beds, or while they work or walk or drive. Even my best students are blank-faced and at least a little sad, so for them almost as much as for myself I scrap plans to talk about nature poetry and show them where it comes from, a hundred feet up, a stick/straw nest yards wide and deep, swaying in what another website tells me is 15° with 40 mile-an-hour winds,

the only sound I hear as the father flies off and the mother sits still except for her twitch-turn head. No sign yet during class of the babies beneath her,

which I forget, somehow, to mention to my students before I share my screen and ask them to jot down what they see, details for each sense, and just as I join them, writing that everything around is brown but her crown and tail and beak, and note how huge the nest is, wonder how long it took the couple mated for life to weave it or if they took over another couple’s who’d died or moved, my daughter texts Oh my God and there they are, both of them, shivering, egg-wet,

downy gray, the mother showing the class and me how she rips into a gashed trout, how she tilts her head as if to kiss, with her hooked beak, her nearly-blind eaglets, their new eyes just opened, necks too weak to rise. She bends with a sliver of fish toward the faster one––first-born, most likely––who’s ravenous, flailing, so the handoff doesn’t happen, the fish disappearing into the nest. She tears another piece and this time it works––the eaglet takes the flesh and swallows,

hungrier for a second bite, it seems, than the first, and then she feeds the shyer one––same deal: fish falls, she gets more, it works––moving back and forth

to the gutted fish until she decides they’ve had enough and stands over them, kneads the straw before she lowers herself, rises, lowers, their world again the dark beneath her. She’ll do this for hours––I’ll come back to watch later. The father will take his shifts, too, stuffing straw beneath him to make up for his smaller size. He’ll feed them another trout near midnight. The mother will zip her head into the anorak of her wings and shield them

from 3 am freezing rain. My daughter texts again, amazing, and I send a heart back––yes, amazing, this instinct to do nothing but ready

these eaglets for their own soaring, slashing lives, a blaze of pure purpose new to me, but old as blood to them––that blaze, that blood poisoned and shotgunned almost into darkness, but saved––one force in our one warming world saved, almost at its end, where in these skies they can spot a rabbit two miles off, dive toward it at a hundred miles an hour, three times faster than a horse could gallop across the muddy fields beneath them this early spring afternoon on which, for now, they sit still, simply being what they are, what they’ll continue to be after I’ve turned back to the day’s demands. which, let’s face it, I know I won’t remember at all.

*https://explore.org/livecams/birds/decorah-eagles-north-nest

Plan

My job was to keep the guard dog busy while someone else scaled a drainpipe and hopped Strathmann’s lumberyard’s wall. My job to click a stick along the gate’s

chained links while the German Shepherd we named Sunshine barked himself foamy in the streetlight’s yellow circle, the world behind him total darkness. We had no

way to save whoever fetched our football if Sunshine saw him hop into the yard or heard his feet scratch the wall on his way out. Imagine?

That’s how it was then: We’d decide on something and go with it and didn’t think of what we’d do if things went wrong. That plan worked for a while. We jumped across alleys on bored summer evenings and never fell the three stories down. We toed the El’s metal catwalk

from station to station and none of its metal grates dropped from beneath us, though each wobbled like it would. We’d do

one thing after another like that, then stay up all night playing Space Invaders and Donkey Kong before we slept into the afternoon.

You know what happened next: An older kid landed on his head trying to shimmy up an El girder to beat the fare. Another drag raced into an Aramingo telephone pole blasting Zeppelin. Tall soccer kid who flunked away a full ride tried to break up a fight between this dude and his girlfriend and got face-bashed into a life of stuttered steps. Sometime around my sophomore year, Philly started coming for us the way the world comes for corner boys who think the corner will always be theirs. Off they went to jail and funeral homes. Off they went into the ether, gone. Then they’d show up on summer nights while we played street hockey to sell us cologne and jean jackets they stole from the mall.

Then they sold weed laced with Fentanyl to hooked suburban kids half-dead

in tents outside Strathman’s, where no dog barks now, where, forty

years ago, a friend’s spiral arced into another’s waiting hands on our side of the fence and we got back to it, juking and spinning on that four-lane

between parked cars and waves of traffic, shadowed by our church and school and block-length empty textile mills, speed-counting to seven Mississippi before we slammed each other to the street’s gravel and crushed glass, blind to what life could give you once you quit trying to give life away.