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?
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Owl
Peter Kane Dufault 1923-2013
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Graphic - Konstantin Vasilyev 1942-1976
