Somewhere above a lover who is busy looking at a body, a bird of prey is making up its mind. That image carries most of Michael John Pickering's "The Event", a short poem about desire, attention and danger. It addresses a "slave of love" at the moment "the whole event is conceived", a phrase that can mean a plan taking shape or something nearer to conception itself. At that moment, it says, "you turn the eye / to the body." The lover's gaze goes downward, toward flesh. Meanwhile, "High / above you", a falcon circles. The poem is about what happens to someone who looks at only one kind of hunger while another closes in.
The poem has no rhyme, no regular metre and almost no punctuation. There is a full stop after "body", a colon after "rock", and a final full stop. Everything else is carried by the line breaks, and they are clever. "High" is stranded at the end of its line, so the word hangs up there for a beat before the next line drops to "above you". The layout acts out the height. The falcon then gets a stanza of its own, "the falcon / that doesn't respect the rules", two short lines that sit in the air like the bird. The poem never says which rules. Given the talk of love and slavery, the likeliest candidates are the conventions of courtship, or the comfortable idea that desire is gentle. Whatever they are, the falcon ignores them.
The third stanza shows the poem's best trick. Its sentence spills across the stanza break, so that the falcon "at every new turn / narrows the circle". The grammar circles as the bird does, holding back its verb until "narrows" and tightening as it goes. The verb is also the poem's quiet threat, since a narrowing circle means a closer kill. The falcon's purpose is then given as "to imagine you / already seized on the rock". The capture happens in the mind first, and "already" treats it as nearly done. This echoes "conceived" in the opening lines. Both the lover and the falcon are shaping the event in imagination before it happens, so the title can cover a seduction and a hunt at once. "Seized" is a violent verb, and "rock" suggests bare, hard ground with nowhere to hide.
Then comes the shock of the last line, set apart on its own: "my beak in your open heart." Until now there has been only "you". Suddenly there is a "my", and we realise the voice has been the falcon's all along, or that the speaker has taken on the bird's identity. The line has no verb. Like "already seized", it presents the act as finished and frozen into an image. The sounds help. The hard stops of "beak" strike against the open vowels of "open heart", so that hardness meets softness. "Open heart" is one of the most worn-out phrases in love poetry, meaning someone emotionally defenceless. Here it becomes literal and bloody, and the cliché is made to hurt again.
The poem is significant because it turns the usual love lyric inside out. We expect a speaker who pleads, praises or suffers. Pickering gives us one who watches from above and plans. Love becomes a hunt in which the weak point is attention, because the "slave" who studies the body never looks up. The poem doesn't say who or what the falcon is. It might be a rival, the beloved, desire itself or simply fate. That uncertainty keeps the circle open, even as the poem's own lines tighten around the reader and shrink to a single line, a single image and a single strike.