Great Grey Owl

From the wide heart of the Great Plains,
home of bluestem, fescue, and bromegrass,

where in high summer,
a wavy thin haze of heat hangs
over fields of clover, ablaze with purple-red flowers;

where dirt roads, barbwire fences, and power lines,
all meet at the still point of a distant horizon;

where occasional approaches lead to farmhouses —
some are squat and shaggy, from entropy, or tragedy, some
are tall and trimmed and circled by silver bins and good fortune.

An eastern sun flashes off the flanks of the half-ton Ford,
the windshield flashes yellow and green.

The Invasive Plant Guide bounces on the seat beside me;
I’m here for the county, to count and map the trespass of weeds.

I park the truck in a shallow ditch and walk over acres
of grey-wooded hay land, cross quarter-sections of grazed pasture.

In places, ox-eye daisies grow thick as snowfall.
On borderlines, like impressionist sunsets,
glow tansy, barberry, toadflax, and buttercup.

Up a low rise, and past a copse of prickly rose,
on a fence post, standing like an apostle,
a Great Grey owl.

I crouch. Motionless. At length
the owl turns its inscrutable head.
Fixes me. The moment swells, looms, then passes.

The owl lifts itself, slow as mist, opens its grand wings,
belly feathers graze the switchgrass in the ditch
and it floats to a post, as if, in another world.

Leaving me in, or rather, leaving in me,
a kind of rapture, a kind of shiver.
And I knew that most of my life was over,
and I saw, for much of it, I was asleep.