Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still For once on the face of the earth, let's stop for a second, and not move our arms so much. It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines; we would all be together in a sudden strangeness. Fisherman in the cold sea would not harm whales and the man gathering salt would not look at his hurt hands. Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, wars with fire, victories with no survivors, would put on clean clothes and walk about with their brothers in the shade, doing nothing. What I want should not be confused with total inactivity. Life is what it is about;... If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems dead in winter and later proves to be alive. Now I'll count up to twelve and you keep quiet and I will go. Something just now moved through my heart like the thinnest of blades as that red-tail pumped once with its great wings and flew above the gray, cracked rock wall. It wasn't about the bird, it was something about the way stone stays mute and put, whatever goes flashing by. Sometimes, when I sit like this, quiet, all the dreams of my blood and all outrageous divisions of time seem ready to leave, to slide out of me. Then, I imagine, I would never move. By now the hawk has flown five miles at least, dazzling whoever else has happened to look up. I was dazzled. But that wasn't the knife. It was the sheer, dense wall of blind stone without a pinch of hope or a single unfulfilled desire sponging up and reflecting, so brilliantly, as it has for centuries, the sun's fire. An eagle's nest on the head of an old redwood on one of the precipice-footed ridges Above Ventana Creek, that jagged country which nothing but a falling meteor will ever plow; no horseman Will ever ride there, no hunter cross this ridge but the winged ones, no one will steal the eggs from this fortress. The she-eagle is old, her mate was shot long ago, she is now mated with a son of hers. When lightning blasted her nest she built it again on the same tree, in the splinters of the thunderbolt. The she-eagle is older than I; she was here when the fires of eighty-five raged on these ridges, She was lately fledged and dared not hunt ahead of them but ate scorched meat. The world has changed in her time; Humanity has multiplied, but not here; men's hopes and thoughts and customs have changed, their powers are enlarged, Their powers and their follies have become fantastic, The unstable animal never has been changed so rapidly. The motor and the plane and the great war have gone over him, And Lenin has lived and Jehovah died: while the mother-eagle Hunts her same hills, crying the same beautiful and lonely cry and is never tired; dreams the same dreams, And hears at night the rock-slides rattle and thunder in the throats of these living mountains. It is good for man To try all changes, progress and corruption, powers, peace and anguish, not to go down the dinosaur's way Until all his capacities have been explored: and it is good for him To know that his needs and nature are no more changed in fact in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles.