A benefit of a leisurely book-sorting project is the opportunity to revist books again. Yesterday, I dipped into Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays (Beacon Press, Boston; 2003) by poet Mary Oliver (1935-2017). The collection brings together poems on birds from the first forty years of her publishing career, along with two essays, also on birds. Not surprisingly, it opens with her “Wild Geese,” and also not surprisingly, it will remain, along with other of her books, on my culled and dusted shelves, to be revisited soon.

Context for My Poem, “Yesterday”:

I took this still life, a little bronze replica of an Etruscan owl, that Tim and I bought decades ago on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, against a piece of Labrodorite (also known as Spectrolite) that I gave Tim for one of our wedding anniversaries. (I think the lines, lights, and shadows of this form of feldspar look like forest branches.) When I took the photograph, I was thinking of how photographers speak of “captures,” and of how poets seize upon–or are seized by–images and ideas. It seemed to me that humans in their creative modes really do resemble raptors, at least during some of the process of creating.

Then, yesterday, reading Oliver’s essay, I learned that the Great Horned Owl, a fearsome raptor, has as their prefered food, brains. Not sure that my poem of the day addresses that odd natural fact adequately, but I wanted to begin to think about this.

Until tomorrow, LESLIE