Regarding the Owls

Michael McGriff
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I marveled at the thin path the deer cut from the lake, through the field, along the crooked teeth of the fence, past the stiff ears of the mule pen, and into the underbrush at the wood’s edge. The path
appeared to crawl from the lake like a sentence starting with the words “I wonder” and ending with a quiet, hooved ellipse that bled into a clearing circled by a stand of alders. It seemed unreal that an animal so wide and easily spooked could leave such a narrow and delicate suggestion of travel. The best way to see the owls in the clearing was to leave from the house right as the late light of day shone on the side of the barn. As if the owls themselves were signaling. When my father was alive, he often spoke of the owls off to the east, on the dry side of the Cascades, how they burrowed and lived in the ground. Dust eaters. The owls in the clearing were different. They were the white masts of white ships as they roosted in the alder branches. They ornamented the clearing like thoughts hung out to dry, nestling themselves deeper into some crook or slumping in place as their heads made slow orbits around their voices of smoke. I knew an owl in the dark was like a nautical instrument kept in a drawer, that the engine of an owl is driven by empty wooden spools and sideways looks. When an owl hissed and whistled and shifted from one foot to the other like a sailor come to port, when its heart pumped iron ore, when it flashed forth like the night’s pickpocket. I knew an owl’s eyes floated in a suspension of gypsum and ash, and that dust trailing a truck down a gravel road in summer was a history of owls rising up from the ground. I knew that once an owl saw you, your name had been entered into a ledger whose pages were as cold and white as the jawbone of the moon.

Michael McGriff is the author of several books, mostly recently Our Secret Life in the Movies, which was listed as one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, Poetry London, and Tin House. Honors for his work include a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice selection, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Eugene, OR.