I will always remember the taste of the pine resin and the weight of the binoculars around my neck, standing next to Dad and the edge of a precipice. I was bored. I was nine. we were looking for sparrowhawks. 

this memory is candescent and paralleled by another memory, cutting and fresh.

I'm in my last year of college and I catch sight of a sparrowhawk in the bookstore. In profile, gray hoodie, eyes the pale color of reindeer moss. she's flipping through The Essential Works of Rumi and I'm already backing out, the hem of my shirt catching on edges. I know what she's looking for in Rumi, word for word and I might have told her word for word. saved her all the decoding.

but I didn't because my friends and I used to shoot birds with BB guns in the dregs of the suburbs.