Listening to Owls

An hour before dawn, two screech owls start calling, loud & close. I feel like an involuntary eavesdropper on someone else’s scandal-ridden version of our lives. It passes from ridge to ridge, shivering over the houses & the thirty-five acres of goldenrod plundered from the woods, like a truncated version of the same open wing that descends nightly all over the world, leaving only a few pinholes of available light.

The owls start calling with the suddenness of all terrible descents. I have just been thinking about the long stretches of highway I would have to walk to visit distant friends, how we have quarreled & quickly, almost effortlessly, made up. But now I tilt my head back & gaze at those enormous purported suns, farther away than their image can travel in a lifetime.

When the owls start calling, it takes me a moment to realize it isn’t my infant niece wailing in the back bedroom, fighting her way free of a bad dream in that existential solitude before language. Sometimes screech owls keep to a monotone trill, but not this morning. It’s all high-pitched peals with a plunge at the end & enough tremolo to make me think of the laughter of the desperately happy – laughing just to keep from crying, as they say in the blues – or delirium tremens, the gone high turned vicious as a beaten dog.

I listen to the owls & chide myself for anthropomorphizing, not unlike Indians who can’t hear an owl call without remembering their own lost or inconsolable dead. Who else could part the air so noiselessly? Staring down the dark tunnels of frantic scurrying lives, the eyes of the ancestors grow big as satellite dishes. They clack their bills.

But these owls are calling for reasons entirely of their own. They bear no greater share of blame for this wild tremor in the human throat, this stutter of images, than any other ill-omened inhabitants of the known world.

This might be a mother & her recently fledged offspring, I think. It occurs to me that they call the way they do – with such brevity & abruptness, throwing their voices – because of their own, well-founded fear of larger owls. They stop far sooner than I stop listening.