Before dawn, a man lies listening to two screech owls, and within a few lines their calling has become a scandal, a baby's cry, a drunk's delirium and a visit from the dead. Dave Bonta's "Listening to Owls" is about how hard it is to hear a wild sound without stuffing it with human meaning. It is also about the small, humbling correction that arrives at the end, when the speaker suggests the owls are simply afraid.
The poem opens with a feeling of trespass. The speaker is an "involuntary eavesdropper / on someone else's scandal-ridden version / of our lives," so the owls are already being heard as gossip about people. The scale then swells. The sound travels "from ridge to ridge," and night becomes one "open wing" that "descends nightly / all over the world, leaving only a few pinholes / of available light." Stars as pinholes in a dark cloth is a precise, slightly claustrophobic image. A few lines later the speaker calls them "enormous purported suns," and the word "purported" shows a mind that doubts even what it has been told about the sky.
The middle of the poem is where the projections pile up. The calls arrive "with the suddenness / of all terrible descents," an echo of that nightly wing. Then the speaker mistakes them for his infant niece "fighting her way free of a bad dream / in that existential solitude before language." That phrase carries the poem's central idea. A baby and an owl both lack words, so listeners supply them. The comparisons then darken: "the laughter of the desperately happy," laughing "just to keep from crying, / as they say in the blues," and finally delirium tremens, "the gone high / turned vicious as a beaten dog." Each image is more damaged than the one before. The technical words for the sound, "high-pitched peals," "plunge," "tremolo," are musical and fairly neutral, which makes the human comparisons look like a mind reaching.
The speaker catches himself here, scolding himself for "anthropomorphizing" and comparing his habit to the belief of "Indians who can't hear an owl call / without remembering their own lost / or inconsolable dead." The phrasing is a sweeping generalization, and it reads more as the speaker's loose gesture toward folk belief than as a careful report. The ancestors' eyes "grow big as satellite dishes," a comic collision of the ancient and the modern. Then "They clack their bills." The line is eerie and funny at once, and it quietly turns the ghosts back into birds.
After that comes a plain, firm turn: "But these owls are calling for reasons entirely of their own." The owls bear no blame "for this wild tremor in the human throat, / this stutter of images." The tremor belongs to the listener. The final stanza is hedged with "might," "I think" and "It occurs to me," and the speaker offers a modest explanation. A mother and a fledgling may call "with such brevity & abruptness, / throwing their voices," out of "well-founded fear / of larger owls." The terror he heard was real, but it was the owls' own. It also echoes the opening wing of night. Even the hunters in this poem are hunted, and the darkness has levels.
The form suits this wandering, self-correcting thought. The poem is free verse with no rhyme and uneven stanzas. Long sentences spill over line breaks ("It passes / from ridge to ridge") as though carrying sound across the valley, and short lines like "loud & close" jolt the reader the way the calls jolt the sleeper. The ampersands give the poem the quick, informal look of notes made in the half-dark, though that is my inference from the page, not a known fact. The last line, "They stop far sooner than I stop listening," is quiet and slightly rueful. The owls finish and the human keeps turning the sound over and making meaning of it.
The poem is worth reading because it is honest about a habit most of us share. It does not pretend to a pure, unfiltered encounter with nature. It shows the mind overreaching, catching itself, and ending with humility and a little tenderness for two frightened birds.