Some have been encouraging me to share more poems. This is one of those rare ones that actually felt finished after I wrote it down. It's actually — and I guess obviously — a collection of several poems written together over the course of a few days. From my "wanderings in the wilderness," when I was always heading north ... always north; as north as north can be. (Why north? Because it isn't south, apparently.)

The Canadian Northern Suite

I. Departures

Union Pacific

Runs slow as sap

This year,

Still I insist

A stranglehold —

Track-pulse coursing through the grabiron

Like last life through a vein,

Thundering,

Drinking in the autumn

While it dies wonderful deaths.

I have missed

The slack-action

Of great departures

All my life —

A long day

Sheltered at the siding

Watching trains slip by.

I would trade

My life for this —

One skull

Worth the moment;

The great rivers

So much larger

Than each bridge.

Sunsets dig beneath

Each surface

As they fade,

Parade the light;

Give the tree-line

Bones, ghosts,

wings —

Creation myths

In life unceasing.

I have never put

That light behind,

Bulkhead-strong

In tatters

And torn blankets;

County bridges, good weather,

Grace in transit.

II. So Taken Care Of

That day when the sky was God,

Smoke spiraled

Clean sacrifice

To heaven;

Bare sleep on old rugs

Was devotion

In the cool bridge-shade

Of early morning.

That black street preacher’s

Holy Ghost

Smiled my face,

The way he reached me

Here, after every

Dangerous mile,

And trusted

That my soul was saved.

That day Jesus was demanding

In the rush of boxcars in the yard,

I was awakened by the growl of

Harleys on the four-lane,

The sky clouding over

So shafts of light

Might girder my chest.

That day he cracked a smile,

Said

“Be that way!”

And walked out ahead of me

Down the line,

The slack-action

Rippling through the couplers

A lifelong journey up my spine;

The birds of the fields

Well-considered;

So beautiful;

So taken care of.

III. Fire Ring

Finally,

The corn is neck-high.

A little late —

Autumn clouds now rolling in;

Heavy silence

Near the fire;

Late summer’s whispers

In the rows

To the clearing

Near the river.

Moonshadows

On the face of us,

Gathered from

Convergences

Untold,

Let go of

A little late;

Eyes shining gold

Through fire,

Giving everything

To flame,

To the murmur of current

Over the rise.

Moonbeams cross-section

The moments,

Distilled forever;

Tin cups

Filled with it —

This night —

Sugared coffee;

Cloud-smothered Perseids

Streaming songs

Of falling to the world.

A little late —

The earthen us —

Thinking of

The double-doused circle

In the morning;

Perfect, magical ring

Holding always

Dying embers in the speeding sun,

Drowned with

Water from the river

Even now

Coursing hopefully on.

IV. Arriving

I remember knowing

The necessity

Of stumble and momentum —

Hovering above

A grid-covered earth

And drinking in direction.

I recall new vocalization;

Songs of pilgrimage

And journey

Pushed through well-hewn

Stiff-water doors,

Arriving out of anterooms —

Out of tunnels

Through the black-lung crust

On platinum rails,

Escape velocity

Twitching in the ears,

Humming every year

Into crosshair focus.

Arriving I imagine

The days before the roar

Of flow and current,

When the curvature

Of the earth was overstated,

Misdirected into confines

Hoping to ice the soul

From care.

V. Catching Out

Living all of life tonight —

One night

To force familiarity

Into endless American miles.

Roadside with open arms

And hands

I give you

Bandaged days;

Every tired moment.

The world collects its toll —

Nightshade-deadly

As a thirty-eight

Hidden in the hay-bin;

Strangers on the road;

Boxcars coasting in the yard.

Wind through weeds

Pulls tomorrow’s miles

Longer,

Stretches me through

Fields of pumpkins,

Over mountains,

To the sea.

Tonight we sleep

A crucifix

In tall grass,

Stars shining through

A distant surface

And bleeding ancient light —

Our eyes oceans

To accept it.

And grace at last is the diesel pull

Of forward and forever,

Trackside always in the morning,

Fires for the chill of Fall,

A glimpse of Jesu

Through safety glass,

And coffee steaming through

The sunrise

Where we part,

Where I am unashamed to laugh aloud alone.

VI. The Trestle

You have traveled north

To where the earth

Holds onto the sun

For as long as it can,

And still stays cold,

Sighed into a flat sleep

Against the sky.

You are stepping off of trains

That have brought you

From the door of one life

To the next,

And interrupt the journey

With this trestle —

Triple-layered lumber

Stacked

By unseen hands

To last the floods,

The winds,

The claws and the backs

Of bears.

You will catch the sun

Between the creek bed

And the rails,

Find Polaris next

And watch it drift

Into your tomorrow.

The Holy Ghost brought you here

To breathe aurora —

To sleep and then awake

To watch this trestle

Take the weight

Of pilgrimage again:

Strong shoulders give it all

In one deep groan,

Longing for the promised land;

Wishing it as easy.

In the morning

You will find all things new,

Beautiful and strange

As a dead bird’s wings

Spread open on the tundra.

And you —

You must let go of it and leave,

And catch out

From all these standing places,

Having dirtied your hands

Against all manner of iron;

Against the dust

Lifted up upon your palms from

Sifting through

The old-bone days;

Caught in all ways up within

The very journey toward

The unsaid things you seek.

Terrors of Boyhood

I was probably about 6 years old when Matthew Meese, who lived around the corner from me, had the brilliant idea to play cowboys and indians. We went to his house, where he ran inside and momentarily produced the following: A papier mache "Indian shield" that his older brother had made in art class; a handful of .38 caliber bullets; and a chrome snub-nosed .38 revolver. (Matthew's father was a security guard.) He handed me the poorly painted papier mache shield and all but one bullet, and then began busily working at the revolver, trying to figure out how to get the chamber free from the gun in order to begin loading bullets. While he was doing this, my eyes were darting from the shield to the gun. I can still feel the sweaty lead tips of those bullets tumbling around nervously in my hand .... My six-year-old brain was apparently ahead of Matthew's in the logic department: "I don't think this shield will stop bullets," I offered. His response? "It's a shield, shields stop bullets." No, no ... something was wrong here. (I knew that when mom safety-pinned a bath towel around my neck to approximate Superman's cape, that didn't mean I'd suddenly inherited the ability to fly and stop speeding freight trains with my outstretched arm.) Maybe I should run this whole thing by my mom. I handed Matthew the shield, and ran back around the block back to my house, where my mom was standing on the sidewalk talking to neighbors, like they used to do back in the old days. (The days when six-year-olds were free to roam the block on their own.) I approached my mom, and tugged on her shirt. I held out my hand and asked if it was true that ALL shields stopped bullets, even ones made of paper.

And that was the last time I ever saw Matthew Meese.

I did manage to keep a bullet ... As I recall, I had a pretty good idea my mom would confiscate them, and so I pocketed one on my way around the block. I had that thing for years. I would lose it much later, after we'd moved to a new town. Another crazy friend was convinced that one could cause a bullet to fire simply by smacking the end of it hard enough. He tried his best to drop it firing-mechanism-side-down into an empty storm sewer in an attempt to set it off. And there it remained, despite all attempts to recover it.

There are days when I stare in amazement as my two boys tempt fate - seemingly in every conceivable way - around the house. My oldest - who will cover his ears and run screaming from the room if you attempt to read him any story wherein a character gets in trouble or becomes sad - will happily try to traverse the living room by leaping from chair-top to chair-top. (Thankfully his head is harder than his pillow-soft heart.) My youngest son has made a habit of announcing all of the things he was thinking of doing, but didn't do. It's a frightening list: "Daddy, I didn't put my arms in the fire ..."; "Daddy, I didn't hit that little boy in the face ..."; "Daddy, I didn't put my head in the TV." He's also taken to providing sneak previews of intended future life choices: "Daddy, when I drive my car, it will be faster than police cars ..."; "Daddy, when I grow up I will jump out of helicopters ..."; "Daddy, one day I will break up all the trees in the whole world." (?) From both of them I get helpful promptings: "You should drive the car FASTER!"; "You should put your glasses in the fire ..."; and my favorite - SAM: "Let's take our brains out and step on them!" LUKE: "Oh YEAH! Take our brains out and put them in a MONSTER TRUCK!" This is the state of affairs at 5 and 2. Drat.

A Quick One ... Off the Cuff ...

This is a way for me to
Collect the differences
Between satellites and stars —
Hold the history of lakeshore
Travel and train wreck
Against my chest;
Mackinac straining against
The years — decades of
Old rust falling from the
Heights into taverns and
8mm recollection —
Church basements dark
With promise and hope.

God Says ...

My sister married her husband Rich back in June of 2008. She asked me to read a poem at her wedding ... preferably one I'd written ... and preferably one I'd written for the occasion. Poems are few and far between for me these days, so it was a challenge. Of course I agreed, put something together pretty quickly ... and then put it down until a week or so before the big day. (Because I work best under pressure, or something.)

As the extended family's resident technophile, I was also recruited to compile the requisite Ken Burns pan-and-scan bride/groom slideshow, and the soon-to-follow also requisite wedding video DVD. So when it came time to author said DVD, the question came up: To preserve my commissioned wedding poem for the ages, should I rely upon the grainy, hesitant image of my middle-aged, nervous, tired self reading said poem at the wedding - garnished with my inability to do so without breaking into tears mid-way through the reading, my shining forehead glistening with flop sweat ... or should I break out the After Effects badness and whip up a quick graphical representation? I took the After Effects route, which is presented here for your edification. It was quick and dirty - only a solitary lens flare effect and a quick Gaussian blur thrown in there for the heck of it - but it was an interesting experiment. In a minimalist sort of way, I hope it hints at what visual/graphical treatment can bring to the poetic table.

One final note: DVD-standard footage is interlaced, which can cause some goofiness when played back on a computer. I didn't bother de-interlacing anything, so the text may be kind of blurry and blotchy ... especially when compressed by Google. But, sorry to say, I've messed around with it as much as I'm willing to. So squint, you big baby.

Happy Mother's Day

From Sam:

I love Mom because: "She loves me and plays with me. She makes food for me and then I don't have to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich myself."

What I Know About Mom:

What does she do?: "Laundry"

What does your dad call her?: "Liz"

What is her favorite food?: "Sandwiches"

What is her favorite color?: "Green"

Does she have any brothers or sisters?: "No"

What does she like to do for fun?: "Play with me"

What is your favorite thing about her: "I like to look at her"

(Note: Could be Daddy's favorite thing about her too.)

Here Comes Spring

Winter in Manhattan is officially declared over with the coming of Irish Fest, culminating in the Irish Fest parade. (This is the case even if snow is piling up and the windchill is a healthy decade below zero.) At the end of the parade the town Christmas tree is unceremoniously taken down and dragged through town chained to the back of a pickup truck. This year we had beautiful weather and a great time. Please excuse the shaky camera: my Flip camcorder has no image stabilizer. As for my dorky laugh, I have no excuse.

About Me and Trains

When I was seven years old, we moved out from under the shadows of blast furnaces and forges just outside of south Chicago in an attempt to escape the patch of rust quickly growing on the industrial economy of the area. I was in the middle of second grade at Park School, three short blocks down from our house, one block over from my great-grandma Torrenga’s house. Park School was a kindergarten-through-third-grade affair housed in a little red-brick building on a corner lot shared with Riverdale’s only park, a tiny catholic church, and four sets of railroad tracks carrying both freight and chrome-bright commuter cars. We surfaced a couple of suburbs to the west, in a house with a large, fenceless backyard featuring another four sets of tracks a literal stone’s throw from the back patio. From an early age, I learned to be comfortable with the blaring horns of trains; the roar and the shake: They did not keep me from learning my d’s from my b’s in Miss Marcunis’s classroom as they thundered by in the afternoon, nor did they wake me up every two hours as they rocketed past and shook the Lego bins against my bedroom wall through the night. I could stand close enough to the tracks to stare into the engineer’s eyes and study with leisure the look of consternation on his face as it dawned on him that no amount of persistent horn-blasting would open up any further distance between my person and his engine. Mind you, I wasn’t reckless, nor were most of the kids in my neighborhood. (Glenn was reckless, but that’s another story.) In the ebb and flow of the day’s rhythm, we grew to instinctively know when to expect the trains. We knew what kind of freight to expect: Mornings brought boxcars and grainers; mid-afternoon meant a potpourri of automobile carriers and flatcars carrying semitrailers and bulk containers; later afternoon and early evening brought torpedo cars with their mysterious orange-glowing molten cargo: They came one after another in short order all through the evening and into the night. They looked to me like some sort of mournful, mystical parade of endangered mammoths linked tail-to-tusk, thundering sadly, slowly off into the dark West.

My poor mother tried every trick imaginable to leverage my predisposition toward nervousness to keep me from growing too comfortable with the tracks and the trains. When it became apparent that appealing to my sense of self-preservation was gaining no traction, she pulled out all the stops: She informed me that if one stood too near a passing train — through some mysterious feat of physics that she was at a loss to elaborate upon — this would cause the train to derail, no doubt killing any workers and passersby, and causing untold millions of dollars worth of damage. And wouldn’t that make me feel terrible? This approach saw some success for a few weeks, until the hypothesis was challenged and put to the test by the neighborhood crew and found wanting.

I’ve always had a terrible sense of geography, direction, and place. Because of this, I easily filled my imagination with ponderings about where these trains came from and where they were going, free of any practical understanding of where the Dolton railyard was in relation to my home, or how the mills and foundries were arranged to shuttle liquid steel and slag from one arm of the operation to another via rail. Long before I understood hobo lingo for death — catching the Westbound — I would find myself studying trains from the first hint of arrival in the east to the last glimpse of dissipation to the west. I was filled with a sense of sadness and longing that is hard to describe and embarrassing even now to admit. It’s always been with me.

The odd thing is, anyone who knows me will testify that I’m by nature a cautious man. My childhood was filled with secret worries and self-imposed pressures that darkened my poor little heart with terrible and unnecessary wall-clouds. Think of long dark hospital hallways at night, absent of mothers or fathers. And yet, where trains are concerned, walking along a line of desolate freight cars at night is a far more comfortable prospect to me than buying tickets, navigating a schedule, and facing a car full of people on the South Shore line with my oldest son to get to the Auto Show at McCormick Place on a bright Saturday afternoon.

As I write this late at night — no joke — I hear two train horns out on the old Wabash line in town. It awakens in me some sleeping old ageless wonder; it makes me want to get my hands on that secret Rand McNally railroad map, adjust for declination on my Silva compass, stuff a notepad, pen, a lighter, some cigars, sunflower seeds and an extra knife into a freezer-sized Ziploc bag, cocoon this all inside a quilted flannel jacket, cable-tie it all together … and catch out. It makes me want to wake up my oldest son and put him in the car, drive him down to the tracks, and watch the trains pass by together, answering any questions he has. It makes me thank God for my good wife and my family; my warm bed; my house and my garage full of tools; the many, many lonely miles I’ve seen north, south, east and west, and the Heaven beneath them.

Dipping My Toes Back into the Poetry Pool ...

Providence Forge

A letter to people who have hurt us begins

With a calloused hand —

Graced with the most tired earth’s offering —

Gently pressed against breath-thin panes —

Waves of nearly timeless light

Imagined from the unseen Lake.

Timelessness is overwhelming

In our homes,

Our factories,

Our sixteen-lane avenues, empty,

That lie high above furnaces, foundries, and four-story flames.

We’ll have sons and keep them from these places;

We’ll have night skies cinder-freed and stacked

Weightless upon the many years of those sons.

            But the express lanes will keep

            Sweetly open for us, stern with constant flow;

            Tucked like tobacco

            Between each word passed among us.

God bless old Chicago,

Mine:

The yards and rails,

Feuding architects;

Kidnapped Indiana blast furnaces, not settled

In the dusk;

Hummingbirds among weed-flowers and rust

Beneath beginnings of bridge-spans —

Midwest miscreants

Still drinking

The grace

In which they’ve been dunked.

Are we moved?

We are moved, indeed.

Saturday evening

The sun downs;

Remaining friends shudder, huddle,

Talk their way out of sand-dune dusks

            And abandoned houses;

            Dead parents;

            Altar calls;

            Damp distributors that would abandon us too close to Ford Heights for comfort.

It gets to the point then (when the light is golden, molten, thick as syrup)

That we cannot be destroyed.

We roam through our corrugated towns

Unhindered, free as looseleaf on streets.

And so then

I will nearly stumble

From the bungalow porch,

In my remembering return

To the lanes,

The Lake —

That contending timelessness —

And be unearthed, unembarrassed to say how much I love Christ,

Babble over drinks about how good he’s been to me and mine.

Why not?

Prairie School nights

Rush

To meet the shores

And abandon anything clever

Our professors would crowd

Past the faith of our fathers or their closing factories.

And we are otherwise alone.

            So comes mercy —

            Clear crossing;

            Group therapy

            Or town meeting

                        And permission to skip.

It is as simple

As suddenly comprehending

What cannot be expressed:

The key is splitting the passage first in two,

And then in two again, again,

Again;

Then working the Title

Into the body of the text.

In all of this, I am only remembering a forge:

Nondescript —

All spark and shadow —

The black

Of each moment

Hammered

Between stroke and strike.

What will we tell our children about worry?

What will we tell them about the wilderness of years

Meant only to brace for surrender?

(Tired, full of joy,

The land yields —

            It always does —

And what was worrisome remains always that way.

What once could kill us always could.)

***

Waters still beneath

A kind of troubled time. Your life.

The present kids pose against

The family Bookstore window a hundred years ago.

All smiles and simple joy,

They follow hallways down

To chairs propped and emptied

Onto church-lawns, steep kettle-sides,

Perfumed songs, shy shoulders

Beside fire-rings.

The whole of it is remembered through murk:

The strange sounds of trees

Recalling in you

Pathways along rails

And the smell of slag:

Your soul sinks in you

Like taconite spilled from bison-fierce, pierced hulls.

            There at the bottom,

Its panic gives way to a world-sick peace.

Then silence. And everything. A resigned glance

Against shadows in the creases of the house.

Something moves. Leaves, maybe. Inside somehow.

A silent hammerstrike's spark begins everything

Again,

Simple as today.

A love for Elohim strong enough

To destroy half-hearted friends

Begins again and again,

Again.

***

The radio says

           

            I really don't know clouds.

            This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.

            I'm a man of means, by no means.

            I’ll fly away.

In a photograph from years before 78 RPM records

Were left alone in the basement,

I watch water fall

From Skyway gutter fields

To anticipate the horizon

Of stogies and small-batch

Garage lights that ignite with the moon each night.

What kind of doubt could make your back burn,

When your two-year-old is as certain of God as he is the floor,

And his knowing settles in you

Dust kicked up by freightliners

Passing wild-eyed west

And longing

For your calluses, your carvings?

                        The world is disappearing,

                        And your years and wanderings

                        Into sad Grace,

                        Falling into the black

                        Between the vertical blinds and the glass;

                        Between the miraculous barbicans winged

                        Within filthy, frightened young doves felled stupid from the nest

                        Onto the un-watered front lawn.

After all,

It means everything.

(It is the street where you live.

It is the Bible-black barrel of a gun and the eyes behind it.)

It is the way a half-done water tower

On the edge of town

Wails in each sunset

With improbable cranes and

Rust-soaked welds:

As you drive it drowns in corn;

A weight crushed upon your lungs

And the heart of your father

And the frowns of your sons.

Regardless,

At the end of the day

The county-damned farmers

Till fields

And send mice scurrying to your crawlspace

And kitchen

While you travel the two-lanes back home.

Sunday brings church

And potential tornadoes;

Songs you barely recall and nearly dropped to sanctuary floors —

            Strangers.

The day is coming, wild and frothing,

When you will need to drive north as you can

And learn to protect your children

From wind.

Or sit in silence

As the meeting passes you by,

Satisfied that you know God,

Or that you know how to fire a six-gun.

***

In the end, you're mud-caked and unashamed.

You are lowered into the Des Plaines or the Calumet.

Revolution lives in you.

God's grace is naked and loud.

Stands an open dream,

One-faced,

Walled and strong and old.

In the dream we’re still,

Floating inches above

Streets thinning to roads,

Then strands,

Then narrow ways forward that end.

We’ve been standing for a while,

Remembering church foyers

And trees with step-ladder limbs

Near each other and nearer still

To each moment leading to the last:

Mills in great distances;

Torpedo cars traversing foundry-to-forge,

Glowing after midnight behind the house;

The sounds of small bones, feather-wrapped, resting

In the hand;

A last time for everything and first time for what is next.

We’re laughing — our fathers, mothers, children with us.

We’re staring through the wavering glass of Mason jars

Out across prairies, trainyards, and half-sold lots.

We’re standing next to campsites, on shorelines, near small fires

Blown by the wind.

We're clothed in righteousness.

We're on hillsides, waiting.

***

Something about the living dead,

Breathing sewers,

Your dad’s .22 pistol sock-strapped and ready to defend

Makes us laugh

And suck on smoke,

Loving our families and waiting for rapture,

            Heading west.

All of this.

It’s a place on a map.

It’s a joke,

Funny

Because it’s true.

"An Owl," or "The Owl"?

In the week before we found out about the loss of our third child, an exceptionally large owl made a nightly habit of perching on top of the utility pole in the eastern corner of our backyard. I say exceptionally large as though I have the proper frame of reference to make the declaration: I don’t. In my wanderings before settling down with my good wife at the turn of the millennium, I’d seen my share of birds of prey: bald eagles wheeling in thermals above the Mississippi; hawks parked on light posts, barn peaks, and telephone poles along pathways, two-lanes, four-lanes, eight-lanes, and railways; and then there was that strange collection of barn owls in the tree at my aunt’s house in the Dakotas when I was a kid, but that too was in the sunlight, gray and waning though it was. But when it comes to large nocturnal birds, my first-hand experience has been for the most part mute. Exceptional or not, it certainly cast a formidable shadow against the December snow and brittle moonlight surrounding our quiet house.


Not that I saw it clearly. In fact, I first heard it. I’d gone out to the garage to throw an empty milk jug in the recycle bin, check the oil in the Honda, and shoehorn a stray pair of diagonal cut pliers into the infuriatingly overpopulated top drawer of my toolbox. I was out there long enough to justify firing up the Emerson CD player I keep there for such occasions. Just as Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” was fading, I heard an oddly familiar sound somehow seeping in from around the insulated door. It was baffling at first: Unmistakable, familiar, but exotic. Oddly, it would take several solid, still minutes for the image to resolve in my mind’s ear: the textbook baritone who-whoing of an owl. It was quietly startling: Loud enough to be heard through the insulated garage door and above the opening strains of Wilco’s “Misunderstood”; loud enough to make me send out a nervous, mumbled prayer. When that strange more-curious-than-scared feeling finally took hold, I opened the garage door and stood in the driveway. My brain at last having cataloged the sound as that of a very loud owl, I began trying to figure the bird’s location.


My immediate impression was that the sound was coming from somewhere directly above me: maybe the neighbor’s maple, maybe even the rooftop. But as I slowly ranged around the driveway with my face bent to the ground and my ears straining — the neighbors no doubt curious but sadly not surprised — the sound seemed to envelop the whole of the property. It came from everywhere. But somehow, under the open winter sky, it was still close and warm. Slowly, I crept along the front of the house, until it became obvious that the owl was somewhere in the back. For a while, I thought it might be in yet another neighbor’s tree, but by the time I’d made it past our oldest son’s bedroom window it was clear: The owl was in our backyard, overlooking the house. Every twenty seconds or so: “who … who-who-who.” I crept closer. I walked the way I imagined ninjas would: toes-first in the snow, heel down gently … pause … listen … repeat. Of course, the owl was watching me the entire time, as it turns out. Just as I got close enough to make out its massive outline against the stars, it leapt up off the utility pole, generated lift with its massive wings, and sped off to a treetop two houses down. I could still see its silhouette. I was struck by how few wing beats it took for it to clear the distance: ground that would have winded me at a slow trot. It regarded me, unconcerned. It wasn’t afraid. It wasn’t nervous. I hadn’t startled it or scared it off. By the time I made it back to the garage, it was clearly back on its perch on top of the utility pole.


It was just an owl. A great horned owl, as it turns out — common all across the state, all across the country, all across the continent. How I managed to pass four decades alive on the planet without ever encountering one is apparently a miracle in and of itself. And yet there was something very strange about that owl. For the next two nights, it would stay close to the house: sometimes perched on that utility pole in the eastern corner; sometimes in the neighbor’s maple tree next door; sometimes — possibly — on our other neighbor’s rooftop. We all heard it, even inside the house with the TV on, or with the kids dancing to Johnny Cash singing “Wabash Cannonball” on the stereo in the living room, or with battle droids and X-wings making war up and down the hallway. On the night of the owl’s discovery, the kids had been in bed. In the morning when I told him about the owl, Sam’s face broke out in a big toothy grin. He looked the way I felt about the owl. I was so thrilled about having an owl around the house; everything about it made me smile — the constant who-whoing in the near-Christmas nights; the thought of this bird being for some reason drawn to our property; the way the kids jumped up and down when they heard it; the way my wife found my amusement to be so amusing. The owl gave me such a clear sense of love for this home we’d been given. I thought about our new baby and was happy to have to make room for him or her.


The last night we had the owl, my wife bundled up Sam in his winter coat and boots before bedtime, and I led him quietly out the front door and around the side of the house. His feet were a whisper on the snow. We stood beneath the branches of the tree in back and watched the owl for a long time. Sam crept closer and closer, so carefully it nearly broke my heart. I whispered, “don’t scare him away,” and he nodded, but he also kept creeping. Oddly, the owl stayed put, even as Sam stepped out of the branch-shadows and into a patch of moonlight. Sam stood for a moment, and then raised a mitten-clad hand, and waved vigorously at the owl. The owl who-whoed. Sam crept carefully back to my side. We stood a little longer, until something strange happened: The owl’s who-whoing stopped completely, and the yard fell silent. The three of us stood in the quiet, with just the gentle “tick-ticking” of dry twigs scraping against each other in the breeze, the fabric of my coat sleeve sliding along the fabric of Sam’s, cars gliding by on Manhattan road, and somewhere in the distance a wind chime. Sam tugged on my coat sleeve: “it’s time to go,” he said. We made our way, ninja-stepping, back to the side of the house. Sam paused for a moment and turned back: “Bye owl, I love you.” Deep in the night, Liz woke me up: “Kevin, listen.” The owl was who-whoing again. We lay there together, listening. That was it. That was the last we saw or heard from our owl. A week later, we would find out that our baby’s heart stopped beating on one of those days or nights over the owl’s time with us.


It’s taken me a long time to write this down, because the owl’s visit has turned into something more to me than its surface would imply. I would hate to ascribe some sort of supernatural significance to what may turn out to be nothing more than our yard’s particularly fertile field-mouse supply. But I do know this much: I have looked back to the owl’s visit with an odd sense of comfort many times in this difficult time, and it’s been a source of affirmation to me about the strength and safety of this home and this family. I also know that my normally nervous Sam seemed awfully familiar around that owl. And I’ve read enough about great horned owls to understand that they’re territorial, they have no known predators, and they nest in early winter. That owl is gone, and there is no nest to be found in our yard or neighboring yards — I’ve checked. Do I think the owl was an escort, sent to protect our baby’s soul from the dangers of the night as he or she crossed over into heaven? Well, no. On the other hand, I do believe God knows that I’d imagine just such a thing, and that I’d find comfort in that image. And if that was all that was happening in those nights — if it was merely the miracle of God giving peace through the timely appearance of an owl in my yard for a few nights — that’s miracle enough. On the other hand, if it was more than that — if it was some sort of angel in owl form, or an owl made to camp about our house for three nights for reasons unknown and bewildering to it, or to act oddly familiar and conversant with my oldest son — that’s no more surprising. In the end, I’m left with trying to convey the humor in a punchline that’s only funny to those who hear it first-hand.