Wayne Ray’s three-line “Playing Scrabble With” stages a small collision between a word game and a bird of prey. A group of people—the plural “their” suggests at least two—are bent over a Scrabble board. Their backs are turned to the window, and the poem places a red-tailed hawk in the same frame, apparently beyond the glass. The central idea is not simply that the players miss what is outside; it is that language and attention can be turned away from the living world even as that world waits at the edge of the room. The dangling “with” asks whether the hawk is a companion, an opponent, or a presence the players never notice.
Syntax does much of the work. The first line ends on the preposition “with,” leaving an expectation: playing Scrabble with whom? The second line interrupts that expectation with “their backs to the window.” It reads as a description of posture, but because the expected noun never arrives, the players seem to be playing with their own turned backs—with their inattention. The final line then offers another possible object: “a red-tailed hawk.” Read across the interruption, the poem almost says “Playing Scrabble with a red-tailed hawk,” as if the bird were the true other presence in the room. The grammar remains deliberately open. There is no main verb, only a participle and two noun phrases, so the entire scene hovers in the present without resolution.
The imagery is spare but sharply angled. The window implies transparency and separation at once: glass lets the eye pass through but keeps the wild outside. “Backs” makes the human figures closed off, their posture a wall facing the reader. The only colour in the poem is the red of the hawk’s tail, a warm flash against the uncoloured indoor scene. The name “red-tailed hawk” belongs to field-guide language, more specific and alive than the board game’s own title. A Scrabble rack could not hold the hyphenated “red-tailed” or the whole bird; the poem can. Language here does what the players will not do: it turns toward the window and notices.
The rhythm sharpens that turn. “Playing Scrabble with” moves through a busy cluster of syllables and ends on the unstressed word “with,” so the line leans forward, incomplete. The second line loosens and falls away on “window,” while the last line closes on the hard monosyllable “hawk.” No rhyme binds the lines, but the sounds move from the brittle consonants of “Scrabble” and “backs” to the more open vowels of “red-tailed hawk.” That final phrase lands like a small release, a breath of wider air after the enclosed game.
What makes the piece significant is its refusal to explain. It never tells us that anyone looks up; it never says whether the hawk is seen or only imagined. It simply places two facts side by side—people playing with letters, a predator outside the glass—and lets the reader feel the difference between inward focus and the wild world behind it. The hawk remains named but not interpreted, a presence outside the human game that continues on its own whether or not the players turn around.