A few neighbors and I were standing in the road
talking while our kids shot baskets
on one of those portable goals
you can raise as they grow.

We were chatting, encouraging the kids on,
when a large bird fell out of the sky
onto my lawn. Some kind of hawk,
it stood there screeching, flapping its wings
but unable to lift off.

I hurried inside the house and grabbed a beach towel
to wrap it in, thinking there were vets and rescues
that cared for raptors — by the time I came back to it,
the bird was dead, ridged claws clutching clumps of grass.
The neighbor who knew birds best
declared it a falcon, peregrine likely, likely juvenile.
Probably poison.

And for the first time in forty years,
I thought of my childhood friend, Frank Miles,
how there toward the end he wore a knit cap,
even on a warm spring day, to hide what the chemo
had done to him. Never grew up, never got old,
dead at age eleven, not fully grown —

how he turned to me while we sat
in the dugout watching the good players
on our team take their turns at bat, Frank,
the honorary mascot, asked through eyes
that were wiser and wetter than my own,
the one question I still don’t have an answer for.