Owls
And maybe this is all we get: a chilly evening,
5:30 and the sun should still be out. Instead October’s
Full Blood Moon has come and gone
over the hospital parking lot. The crickets’ warning song
has already begun. My body, we’ve learned, has forgotten again
what to carry and what
to discard, like those owl pellets we dissected in the fourth grade:
here the jaw, there the shoulder blade of some smaller creature.
I imagine an ossuary blooming in my gut, a stone well
of tiny bones, ancestors tunneling through the cartilage,
though of course I know this is impossible: ancestors
are supposed to stay dead.
A graveyard forgets more than we know. Names obscured
by time and weather, grass
grown over a stone. So, too, a body.
Mine has forgotten so much. Has forgotten
rhythms: stars, bird calls. But as we pull in the driveway
that night, a Great Horned Owl, then another,
chanting their duet—first the female,
then the male, slightly deeper. The evening carrying
their song through our open window.
I will never be an ancestor. In a few days my body
will miscarry for the fourth and final time. And maybe
this is just what we get: you, me,
calling each other in the dark. Love: the one,
then the other. A book, two opposite pages
kissing. A glass house. Outside, constellations
in a quickening sky. Owls finding each other in the dark.
