Autocorrect for Beauty

Leaving work one afternoon, I saw a hawk

on the pergola in the formal garden where

no one ever goes. We thought we needed beauty —

and we do — but humans often screw things up.

The hawk stood watching and waiting, bright

tail burning sumac red in the vacant white

and brown of winter. I knew he’d outlast

me — zero degrees as it was — but still

I stayed, watching him watch.

I’ve passed the empty pergola at least five

hundred times since then, in every kind

of weather, but if I look, my hawk is there:

beauty by surprise overrides all succeeding

days — and so the part of us that isn’t us survives.