At first it seems the most subtle
of spirits, inhabiting invisibly this dense,
adumbral light at the bottom of the woodland
understory, the rise and fall
of its own recurring phrase
so tremulous, so mournful a tone, we resist
our impulse to pause beneath the trees,
to pass our hands
in blessing over our hearts,
and though it comes to us bidden, awing
out of the wavering green, the sort
of fabled creature
once the familiar of myth
and bewitchment, when it finally sways
above us, horned and docile on the arm
of the maple, repeating
our imitative call,
we see it’s clearly the mottled little dukelet,
the lone scritch, the wickering owl
in its gray phase, bird
of the most common public
exotic, who follows us even as we follow it
deeper into the woods, the temporal world
of moth and worm,
root and earth, of the wanton
and wild, into the darkness, that place
to which we convince ourselves
we’ve each returned.
This poem first appeared in Ploughshares.
—
Myrna Stone is the author of six books of poems. A two-time Ohioana Book Award Finalist, her work has appeared in seventeen anthologies and in over fifty journals including Poetry, Southwest Review, The Massachusetts Review, Boulevard, Nimrod, and River Styx. She has received three Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, a full fellowship to Vermont Studio Center, the 2001 Ohio Poet of the Year award, and the 2017 New Letters Prize in Poetry.
