That Day's Destination
and Other Prose Poems

"After the storm the ocean returned without fanfare to its old offices; the tide climbed onto the snow-covered shore and then receded; so there was the world: sky, water, the pale sand and, where the tide had reached that day's destination, the snow." – Mary Oliver from "Three Prose Poems"



1.
Owl, forgive me, I have never seen such a thing. Owl lain down among the thin trailine trees. Owl as fresh as its day of creation. Owl, feathers aflame by a careless wind. Down to my knees to see the thick brown jewel of your left eye. Blank as space, the night there still captured. They say that crows in their black hoods stalk you.

2.
What is the winter ice across the lake but curtains of waiting? As of any other day, when out the back door at first light, a temptation of morning air holds the coarse and vibrant sting of wintering bird song. Today a cardinal, by six in the morning, peeking along the line of the neighbor's front yard apple limb lines. My dab of crimson, a spot color as the manufacturers might say, among the drab confusion of melting winter rags of lawns and the dumb cement of sidewalks. You see, I am always in waiting; like you I want the flash and the electric string of things; more cardinal, less trash. Two selves by urban morning know not what to do. Out along the river will be the crash of inertly bold ducks who have made a living at the open water below the bridge. Against the silence the ducks erupt. The morning is still the earth's and I want to walk only among the refugees of night to early morning. My mind wanders, standing just there outside my back stoop, a monk, a jesuit, a costume of the holy, but then drag myself back into threaded rooms of house. Do you see the world? The march of hours dances along the passages of mind settled there since a child. Some new venture of mind, call it age, call it what you will, stands inside to a computer, hunched over caressing all the should do's. Later, the owl. Later, the ice casts hanging like staffs of the surreal off limestone cliffs of Raymond Cove. All these love letters to the earth and still the tied curtains of waiting.

3.
We once lived at top of our own hill. A little town bluff, sequenced like tied ribbon by houses tucked into their little plots of coulees and manmade plateaus. The day we first visited, I walked out the back door to bent auditorium of oak woods, many of the limbs tending to the eaves and roofline of the house. I walked to the edge where the lawn met woods. No one had lived here months and the brambles and mayapples had asserted like silent troops up ward and up ward. I looked up into the slender leafless basswood. Through a section of limbs, a silhouette like a black sack, stood. Who sees an owl understood.