by Kasey Jueds
Even an island
may vanish. Even, from fields,
the small earthen hills
shaped like turtles or bears,
meant to guide the dead
into the next world.
But how quietly you
were saved, in the silence between
the barred owl calling out
to her mate, and—years
or moments later—the reply. Now
let the kitchen clock speak
in the voices of birds. Let snow
find the hollow
in the abandoned sparrow’s nest.
At dusk, all the hours
lichened into being, descending
the trunks of beeches. Seedheads
of grasses snag your coat-hem
and you carry them, unknowing,
for miles. Past the statue
that never was an angel,
just a girl with hands clasped
behind her back—as in the child’s game
of guessing: which one palms
a secret object, which folds only
over air? You’ll have to choose,
but it’s no matter. Right or wrong, no wind
can dismantle her stillness. Nor flowers
drown in her hair.
::
Kasey Jueds is the author of two collections of poetry, both from the University of Pittsburgh Press: Keeper, which won the 2012 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and The Thicket. She lives on ancestral Lenape land in a small town in the mountains of New York State.
Image: Plate 46 of Birds of America by John James Audubon, depicting a Barred Owl. In the Public Domain.
ID: A Barred Owl with outstretched wings faces a grey squirrel.
Psaltery & Lyre 
