We’ve spent so many moments, you and I, together,
As you’ve grown from chubby little giggling baby to lanky curly elf with
wide brown eyes and broken tooth.
How often, though, it seems we both exist alone --
-- you in your world, me in mine.
You show me only glimpses of that strange and swarming world behind those
eyes,
the world you always seem to see...
A world so seldom visible to me.

Amid the lichen-shaggy trunks of fir and spruce, we hear it.
A hooting we’ve heard before, outside our tent, as we huddled half-asleep,
looking at the branches silhouetted by the moonlight on the nylon overhead.
This hooting now seems wrong, this hot September afternoon, when mountain
creeks have dried to dusty cracks.
“Did you hear that?” we ask each other.
There it goes again: hoothoothoothooooooot...
So close. We push our way past yielding saplings, scramble over spongy
logs.

“There he is,” you hiss.
“No,” I say, following your finger’s angle high into the branches of a
spruce.
“That’s just a broken branch.” But I aim binoculars and see
big yellow eyes that almost seem to shine amid the shadows,
high up the massive mossy trunk,
set atop a sooty shape that still looks like a broken piece of branch,
an upturned shard of bark, except for eyes.

His back is to us, but his head is turned to see what sort of creatures make
so great a noise as they approach.

We look in silence. We pass binoculars back and forth.
“We did it,” you say. “We went owling.”

You remember the book I read to you so many nights -- Owl Moon -- a dad and
daughter one moonlit, frozen night
with snow beneath their feet, looking for owls in the woods and finding a
big one. Just like this one.

We exchange high fives. For a moment, we’re together.

The love I feel for you can hurt so much at times.





 
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