by James Owens
1.
Against the reduction to black-and-white of the year’s first real snow,
five jays are muscled, busy splashes of blue.
They work our patch of sunflowers, hanging
on the swaying stalks to pry fat seeds
from the drooping, desiccated flower heads.
Every fall, I expect the jays to migrate,
but a few always tough out the winter.
They shake loose showers of snow.
They tilt their beaks with intelligence
and figure leverage.
2.
The snow hides some things and makes others plain.
Rabbit tracks cross and cross the trail,
in and out of the bushes and young pines.
And the prints of a fox, spaced and lined neatly,
the distance between tracks lengthening now,
where it picked up speed and chased
a rabbit out of sight, among the trees.
There must be the most intimate red, somewhere,
blood melting the snow then freezing in it,
tufts of torn fur blowing around.
Here, a vole has crossed, the line of its tail
drawn between delicate small feet,
a thin zipper that has closed the snow.
3.
Halfway up the hill, before winding toward home,
I pause on the rocks to watch snow falling
into a swale of birch and evergreen
and to hear its shushing to earth.
A movement at the edge of sight.
A wolf slips without sound down the opposite slope,
toward the river, a predator grey and expert among the birches.
A jolt of adrenaline: I am meat with language tacked on.
I wouldn’t have seen the wolf, without stopping for beauty.
How many are near? How often, when I think
myself alone, am I observed and measured?
::
James Owens’s newest book is Family Portrait with Scythe (Bottom Dog Press, 2020). His poems and translations appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in The Christian Century, Dappled Things, Clerestory, Relief and The Windhover. He earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in a small town in northern Ontario.
Image: Nadine Marfurt
ID: foot prints in snow against a blue sky.
Psaltery & Lyre 