The Decoy

Daniel Tobin

When I read about the eagle that soared
Down from its heaven, having spied from the heights
That lone duck it assumed would be its dinner,
And thought how its single-minded eye
Must have clicked on its prey like a camera’s shutter
Before it glided along its own rifling image
In the water, then caught in its relentless grip
The decoy a fisherman chained to the lakebed
Before it rose aloft, knowing itself
Again the flawless master of its realm,
I thought of the time I dialed by instinct
My dead parents’ phone, how I sat in the room
As the forwarded number came up as my own,
Like some unalterable link of fate
Snapping me back to my past, and think now
How I perched on the numbed edge of my world
The way the eagle must have hovered in bewilderment
After the anchor, immovable below, wrenched
The wooden bird from its talons, the chain
An iron cord splashing back into the deep,
Then silence. And both of us stunned by gravity.

 Selected from The Artful Dodge 44/45.