I am listening for an owl that doesn’t call.
It’s as taciturn as the coyotes whose presence here
we mainly infer from footprints.
Night ripens on the boughs, its blue-black fruit
an antidote to the 24-hour Wal-Mart of the soul
in which I sink.
I live in an Appalachian hollow in the Juniata watershed of central Pennsylvania, and spend a great deal of time walking in the woods. Here’s a bio. All of my writing here is available for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. For attribution in printed material, my name (Dave Bonta) will suffice, but for web use, please link back to the original. Contact me for permission to waive the “share alike” provision (e.g. for use in a conventionally copyrighted work).