Peregrine

​She was the victim of her own crazed rush toward prey,
which was her reflection in the mirrored
stories of an office tower, as talons slick as scalpel blades
chased death down, until, suddenly aware, she turned
so only her great wing struck glass—a staccato crack--
like a pistol’s single report, the distracted secretary
seeing only a breathless shadow behind her boss’s back,
the falcon, injured wing still good another twenty miles,
sleek heart racing toward its final beat, toward the trance
of water, black and amber with sunset, buoying her
reflection, so when she fell it was into herself, a dance
with gravity which drew her headlong toward beauty like her own,
in that blind moment when wings touched, meaning to ascend,
even as the inarticulate world rose to break them.