This is it: my little room.
Glowering there, one wooden chair
oriented to see, out there, the field
where families hide from the hawk,
and the hawk taunts the old dog,
and we're all just looking for a crumb.
Our tongues flick out for a crumb
that was swept into the cracks of the room.
In my reaching, I topple the chair
and a breeze flushes in from the field,
beat from the wings of the hunting hawk.
I thump and flail like the tail of the dog.
I cling to the door, call for the dog,
who barks for the promise of a crumb
and bumps against the walls of the room.
He jumps over the collapsed chair,
coated in the mites and dust of the field,
forgetting the glaring eyes of the hawk.
The grime of the window still frames the hawk,
gloating over the absence of the old dog,
hunting for a mouse distracted by a bread crumb.
The mouse in the tallgrass is like me in my room.
She's got a stump for a solemn chair,
Protruding like a sore from the sloping field.
I cower from the vast width of the field
and shield my neck from that damn hawk,
listening for the urgent bark of the dog
while I roll panic between my fingers until it's a crumb
and pace atop the creaking floors of my room,
pleading for forgiveness from my battered chair.
Oh, I am so sorry I toppled you, chair.
These things happen, since I won't enter the field
and bare my flesh to the beak of the hawk.
Instead, I stay cloistered here, a hermit with my dog,
the two of us together, searching for a crumb,
beneath the baseboards of this empty room.
I sweep a crumb from the seat of the chair,
set it right in the corner of the room with a view of the hawk,
open the door for the dog and let him, on the verge of ecstasy, into the field.