Auguries

A series. "Two white swans as frail as love"

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In Memoriam, Nat Belz

I

More apparition than epiphany:
Two specks of snowy pallor
Or bent moonlight I saw hovering
Near the lake’s edge on the night you died.

Twin swans, so luminous
I stopped the car, with the headlights
Spilling their coinage of gold
Across a curve in the potholed tarmac,

And lingered, breathing, listening for the songs
They sometimes pipe at evening,
As their bruised faces mingled
With dark water and the shadows of trees

That stood as I did, in splayed attention,
Ready to receive some vision but graced only
By their silent heraldry: two white swans
As frail as love, stark against a field of black.

II

Later that March, a barred owl
Turned its cracked white mask toward us
As we rounded the corner
On a little trail through spruces.

Dazzled, barely breathing,
We felt the seconds running
Cold around our heels
Like snowmelt.

There was nothing to ask it.
It was simply there, a totem of beaked
And crenelated bone that rose
And left us not quite as we were.

III

The weather spiked into a freakish heat.
Out again, we trudged between pines and dunes,
Sweating in our jackets, looking for the off-
White shadow of an owl like a hunted hart.

“Times have changed,” our guide pontificated.
“Snowies venture south less often
Than they did. Sometimes you find them dead.”
Spun-gold sunlight, needles crosshatching cool sand,

The ocean’s last rights a susurrus murmured
Just over the ridge. We scanned the owls’
Usual hiding places, strained to hear their flutes
So hard the silence rang like bells.

And I wondered whether finding one
Would be better or worse
Than this keen and unrequited hope that stabbed us,
Climbing hungrily over each new crest.

IV

Looking back over these lines, it’s clear
That I can’t scrub the moving shadows
Of water birds and night birds
From my thoughts of life and limits.

That maybe from some longing
For the numinous, I’ve always wanted
Winged things to serve as messengers.
When my grandmother died, before I knew

She’d died, two ground doves perched
On the fence’s snowy rim in my back yard,
Preening and rumpling. I never saw them leave
And thus was haunted by their vanishing.

There’s grace in such departures, though.
In the riddling silence that unskeins
When old friends like you depart, leaving nothing
But a warm smell and a rustle at the gate like wings.

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