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what the snowy owl meant
we found it on the side of the highway that leads
the longer way back home, splayed out
like a sunbather between the basalts. I was driving—
pulled the car over and we all
hiked back to see it, swelling with that strange
curiosity that comes from
finding a dead thing you can name.
it was the summer of funerals we couldn’t
attend – grief over the webcam speaker like mirage – delusional
water over blacktop. like every August, somebody
plowed a ditch with his tractor so the brush fire wouldn’t
spread, and somebody else drowned in the river.
the bird was half-stiff, headless, an almost-
thing, and a middle-aged man in a hatchback passed us
three times – first one way, then back to look, then again
the way he’d meant to go all along. I was trying not to be
what I always was: ungrateful; trying to remember all
the time my body had spent refusing
to fall into things that could hurt. and when R took the owl
by its wings and lifted it up into flight, white feather
and covert rippling in the
wind, I saw what it was: a renewal,
something from which we siphon tragedy
and breathe into it – life. |
