Pink Ochre Magazine

Tchotchke I bet my mother bought in a gift shop
in Pasadena because it was cute. Sculpted
chunk of gypsum, all face and feathers,
squat trinket worth some serious money
but nothing you’d ever see sitting in a tree.
My parents went to the Rose Parade,
they watched the Bruins hold off the Spartans,
my father defended in the spring, and the owl
made the move to Tennessee in a VW bug
the year before I was brought into the world
crying. My mother loved animals and yellow.
She passed alone in a hospital bed.
She had wished nothing more than to go home
and pull the bedcovers over her head.
After I’d said her remembrance
and the service was over, I swiped the owl
right from her nightstand without asking,
stashed it in my suitcase with her ashes,
brought them home. Now they occupy
a corner on my desk, small urn in the center
of the bird-circle, where the owl has joined
the sparrow, the robin, and the duck, discussing
what I don’t hear and can never know.
An owl has been hanging out in our woods
ever since she died, ever since the virus
sent us inside. I’ve only seen it secondhand
in a neighbor’s photo, enormous,
imperious. Every day the two-note whoo,
two-note slur, stall and fall-off in the throat.
Not song, exactly, more like a sounding,
more like nagging–get up, go do something.