It wasn’t that the eagle didn’t love you,
that his plumage wasn’t cut like a paper
snowflake is cut, repeating itself like a heart
is cut, or repeats itself—No.
You were not ill-informed when you shone
the beam of your breast to the sky, open not
like an eyelid but like a placid lake, not empty
but full of breath, save the penny copper pitched
bright and arcing, the very vision of tailwind,
of soaring, straddling stratosphere—
and you, you dumb mouthed and merely humanoid,
all you can do is call this love! Reduce to singularity!
The one! Name your devotion after the tallest
living thing in sight: pine, to do it, to be it,
to stretch as tall as the bounds the earth knows
and try to break the unbreakable canvas of air—no.
It was not that the eagle did not love you. It is that the eagle
loved a grander, more crushing journey than your hope,
than your delicacies of happiness, more than is
contained in the hero’s journey. The eagle, you see,
has no home from which to venture from, cannot be
divinely interfered with. The mistake you make
is that the eagle you see is not the hero, nor are you
the hero, the eagle has been placed here for you
to fall into as you would your own placid image, yes.
You have been chosen. Your topography
is the only emotional reason the eagle is yours.
Again, it is not the reason the eagle cannot love you.
You must cease tearing your breast, raking
the song from your throat. You are only
surrendering that which the eagle has
been trained to want: that which pumps inside
of you, the secret cartography of your own mind,
writ large in invisible ink, invisible only to those
who have not been bred to look for it.
Poet and translator July Westhale was born in the American Southwest. Their books include moon moon, Trailer Trash, Unmade Hearts, and Via Negativa, which Publishers Weekly called “stunning” in a starred review. Ocean Vuong chose Westhale as the 2018 University of Arizona Poetry Center Fellow. Their translation of the Chilean poet Rolando Cardenas’ collected works was selected for the 2026 Unsung Masters Series (forthcoming from Pleiades Press). They have work in McSweeney’s, DIAGRAM, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Huffington Post, among others. July is represented by Carolyn Forde at Transatlantic and lives in Tucson, where they are adapting their novel to film.
