Classic Poem

In the unnavigable dusk, when
it is neither day nor dark,
when pilots of small planes flick
running lights on and hurry down,
and in the town
it is supper —
then onto the shadow of the world
launches the owl.

Up there over the reservoir,
between ice rafts and stars,
the hunched silhouette goes
a slanting, silent mile
to a blurred hill,
there to lurk
alone, muffled in gray drift
of his imponderable down.

No innocence could seem soft to touch
as that lynx-of-the-wind who
tramples no twig, rustles no
dry grass or leaf, whose wings stroke
lightly as smoke
when,
with ubi-loquial hoot,
he dissolves from a limb.

Yet all the while he hoots, floats,
vague as pod-puff or moon-gall,
in velvetest sockets curl
the ironic grapples that posit
dying rabbit,
plucked grouse.
In his own way the owl
is definite. Gloved

in the generality of dusk
deepening over reservoir,
talons are, making the poor
loon dive from nothing, the rat
hesitate.
How dare disbelieve
the Indians' orenda, or the Greeks'
Athene, the Owl?











Copyright ┬®. Reprinted by permission of the author.