David Morley: The Teardrop Stoop

The Teardrop Stoop

Teardrop (verb): To stoop downwards in a teardrop shape

Stoop (verb): To tuck in the wings and dive headfirst from a height

                        Terms of Falconry

 

I knew her first as a brancher, pin-feathered,

gawky, mewing for tidbits, daughtered

 

to a haggard; she, strafed by hunger streaks.

I cast the bird to cope her, cere to beak;

 

imped her of fret marks, fastened fresh coverts,

as she sloughed, shook, side-stepped her blood feathers.

 

Intermewed, enseamed, she bobbed and bated

on her block perch. Penned-hard, she bloomed,

 

bowsed and bathed in her mews. Full summed

in flight feathers, wrangling for hours with a tiring

 

while tercels bickered, covetous, hungering

through the chicken-wire of her hawk-dwelling.

 

What were tercels when she had widgeon wing?

She mantled over raw meat, fleshed herself strong.

 

 

Amok mocking tercels slide-fly, gangling

on creances, crabbing over catches,

 

mantling offal, blood-booted in raw cruor.

The falcon rakes away from her spun prey,

 

pulls out of her stoop, foiled by cacophony.

Grounded birds are rounded up, gauntleted,

 

handled to their hawk-boxes, the free-lofts.

The whirling lure blandishes her: this bechin,

 

this gift of grume, this Catherine-wheeling

quarry: chick, wood-mouse—this neck-nipped tempter.

 

Tracker, trailer, trapper, her talons unsheathed—

fore-swept, dead-locked, whetted, teardropped to stoop—

 

strikes the lure—mid-air, mid-arc—clasps, clenches

its crushed coils; lays over, sunning on her sharps.

 

 

She weathers with Lannerets and Sakarets—

blind emperors in turbaned Turk’s Head Knots—

 

bound, jessed, sunned, flumped upon their parched perches

in the weathering yard. Tercels bathe and bowse,

 

feak, vomit, ruffle, preen, tug up talons

of one foot, wing-over their ceres, and doze.

 

Sole Falcon among males, she snites, swivels
and vents; warbles her wings above her back

 

tenting tensioned sarcels. Falco peregrinus

full-roused, her bow-perch both eye and eyrie,

 

raking the sun-wan yawning yard for quarry.

Rankling, mantling, muting, slicing—in sheer

 

yarak of her yearning; casting off from the fist

of the hunt, gyring to her sky-eyed pitch.

 

 

She has done with tiring, that too tough gobbet

of rabbit, crop-crunched, rangled with gravel,

 

endewed to the stomach before casting.

Now for her grace-grooming: her beak trawling

 

remiges, rectrices, pendants, alula,

her preen gland gleaming. She stipples her beak,

 

tongues oils over and between rachis, vane,

barbs, sarcels, down, crural, calamus,

 

semi-plumes, filo-plumes. Self-touch soothes her.

Soft-eyed, she ruffles. She shuffles over.

 

I caress her commissure with one finger.
She rocks on her keel, downily, drowsily.

 

Are we daring each other? I draw the braces

of her hood so that they tauten and clasp.

 

 

She springs in her yarak, ripe in her crouch.

I slip an anklet around her tarsus,

 

jesses to make her bracelet, snug bewit

for her bells. She binds to my wrist, warbling,

 

bobbing before casting off, sprung, free-flying,

stamps stairs of air, punching breeze, flinging

 

thumped thermals; vectors, vortices whistling,

isthmi of force fountaining, bouncing

 

beneath her aimed, armed anti-grav sheer through

cirrus, stratus, woolpacks of cumulus;

 

eclipsing, outcropping, playing the plinth

of her pitch, two thousand feet above my stare.

 

She stalls over the lure—

stoops.

             David Morley