An owl whose face is shaped
into a white heart
may be the only gleaming thing
beneath the eave of the house.
Despite its luminance, it never
questions the dark, or asks why
it is dark. It merely repeats what must be
its first memory: the click
and shriek of the pulley that lowered it
from the moon into this black bay.
I know the body, moving forward,
is pulled continually back. Isn’t this
primitive? This bird, whose face
might have been drawn by a child,
can hear, at thirty yards, a mouse
stepping on hard ground.
It will fly at night over a black
marsh, then drop ten feet—the mouse
grasped with pointed accuracy.
When I was a child, my mother sat
on a piano bench and touched, quickly,
the middle key. Listen, she said,
C is both flat and sharp.
Ocean, I thought. End and beginning.
—Melanie Carter
The Biology Club cordially thanks Dr. Melanie Carter for contributing this poem to The Neuron!
Tags: melanie carter, owl, poem
