Daniel Fitzpatrick

Daniel Fitzpatrick grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, and now lives in Hot Springs, Arkansas, with his wife and two children. He is pursuing an MPhil in creative writing at Trinity College Dublin.

Habit

You must know that the limbs
rise higher on the maple’s northern side
and when the Fish would flicker
on your end of the horizon
if you wish to see the bear.

You must go past the last cut stump
to the lightning’s final carving.
Rest your gun in the raw gash
and hang the compass and bottle
from the bark’s charred tines

and stop beside the oxbow so
your face might be the fly
the brooding bass has never seen
and let it rise. Nothing itself will swell
in its rippleless disappearance.

After months hunting woods most remote
you’ll hear a neighbor’s seen it
pawing the packed earth beneath
the feeder. Your brother, dropping by
between D.C. and Dallas, will snap

a photo up the road as he pulls in.
Keep on until its stench blinds you,
until it rises, daring your eyes to climb
to invisible stars simmering on its shoulder.
No one will know, and nothing will descend again.


Falcon

For my daughter

Some sixty moons have crested since
your nails first gripped my shoulders.
Since then you’ve grown to know
the space between the morsel and my fingers
and to delight in clattering beyond my call,
the wheels whirling you farther and farther out
to turn and race back, not to my voice
but into the wind that made you spread
your palms and gasp before you could walk.
I’ve taken the threadbare hood,
like a soul worn down to its last body,
and set it, despite a decade’s protests,
over the indelicate angle of your brows.
Without it now my eyes are sewn shut by the sun.