could not be counted on she slept a little day and night she didn’t need

her stockings or her purse she watered she weeded she fertilized she stood

in front the tallest stalk keeping the deer the birds all

the world’s idle shameless thieves away

OWL

the sign for making the most of what you have

on the human hand is a thumb at full right angle to the palm

for the owl it’s two talons forward two back a flexible foot

that crushes the prey and lifts it to the beak to the eyes

which are legally blind this is why the owl

hunts in the dark in the dusk when nothing is clearly seen

and why the owl’s eyes are fixed facing ahead to better focus

so its whole face swivels in each direction like the turret on a tank

the round plates of feathers surrounding the eyes collect the least sound

when it turns the owl is computing by geometry the exact

location of the mouse or snake or songbird

that moves imperceptibly in its nest toward which the owl

sets out from the hole in the tree the burrow the eave of the barn

and crosses the field in utter silence wing-feathers overlapped

to make no sound poor mouse poor rabbit

last night

from the porch obbligato to the brook and the snuffling deer

intent on the gnarled worm-bitten apples we leave on the tree

I heard what must have been a Barred Owl or a Barn Owl

or a Lesser Horned Owl close by not deep in the woods

what I heard was less a call than a cry

a fragment repeating repeating a kind of shudder

which may be why the country people I come from

thought an owl was prescient ill-omen meant to unspool

the threads they’d gathered and wound I was a grown woman

when my father took the key from under the eave

and unlocked the door to the darkened house he had grown up in

and stepped across the threshold and said as he entered the empty room

hello Miss Sally as though his stepmother dead for weeks

were still in her usual chair

in the Medicine Wheel

the emblem for wisdom is the same for gratitude at dusk at dark

the farsighted owl strikes in utter silence when we hear it

from the tree or the barn what it announces

is already finished

MILKMAID

white froth overnight on bare ground brown leaves

no yellow bus on the snow-slicked road so I could help my father

deliver the mail his other job begin at six finish at two then farm

my part was laboring through the drifts

toward the red flag the widow’s flag meant

dried-apple pies fried pockets of fruit to sweeten

his usual bitter thermos his usual two sandwiches

one butter sliced in a slab the peasant’s cheese one meat

maybe headcheese the leftover parts of pig snowdays