-- for my friends, especially Ken Brewer
Today I glimpsed
a short-eared owl above
a rise just south
of Little Mountain.
Gone, when I looked again.
Of course this is metaphor
for the beauty and brevity
of life and for tragedy.
The owl will kill,
the owl will die.
At home, at dusk, in snow,
I hauled cut flood-wood
from the other side
of the river then
stacked logs by the willows
where we're talked an looked,
where we've listened to murmurs
of water and fire.
It was cold and nearly dark
when, stooping, I stopped
and heard the dipper's song go on and on.
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Christopher Cokinos is the author of two literary nonfiction books, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds and The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars. The winner of a Whiting Award, he has had essays, poems, and reviews in Orion, High Country News, The American Scholar, Poetry, Western Humanities Review, Science, and Birder's World. He is an Associate Professor in the MFA program and the Institute of the Environment at the University of Arizona.
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