It makes you realize how intimately interconnected we are with the natural world around us. A picture of the great enigmatic avian being follows the poem.
The Big Gray Blur (or, The Owl)
On the 13th day
after my grandmother passed away---
into what?
The one true question
whose one true answer
will appear
at the end of this poem---
On the 13th day
after my grandmother passed away
her soul ascended to heaven—
that’s what Hindus say.
So we,
still attached to this blue-and-gold gem of a world, needed to celebrate.
So we did.
Friends and family enjoyed a traditional South Indian funereal meal on our patio.
That evening,
I was cleaning up,
looked up,
and saw an owl.
Perched on a branch of a catalpa tree,
it stared at the house.
I looked at it.
It looked back.
I left,
threw some trash away,
returned.
Still on the branch,
encircled in a halo
of lesser birds—
cardinals, blue jays, robins—
the masterpiece
of the avian species
stared at the house.
It was getting dark.
I went inside,
but about an hour later
stepped back outside—
it was gone.
*
The next day
I wondered,
Will it be here? That evening,
it was. Perched on the branch
of another catalpa tree,
I stared at it,
and it stared back at me.
I’d cock my head to my right,
it would cock its head to its left.
Suddenly, it flew down,
to the ground, and looked at me, from about six feet away,
ruffled its wings.
I looked at it.
We kept each other’s company for an hour, at least.
As I turned to go inside,
I suddenly turned back, asked it,
“Grandma, is that you?”
*
It returned the next day.
And the next.
One Saturday evening, I’d gone out,
and wondered if it had come by when I was gone.
The next morning,
I went out into the yard,
with a cup of coffee.
As I entered the yard, a big gray blur swifted through the corner
of my left eye—
It can’t be him, I thought.
It was.
It---now also a he—
perched on a branch near the top of a tall, slender, silver maple. It stared into the sky, down at me.
It watched me drink coffee.
Two hours later,
when I left for work, he watched me leave.
*
I sent a picture of the owl
to my close friends and family.
“It’s your grandma,” said a good friend, “I know it. She’s with you.”
“That’s her soul,” said my uncle, her son.
“The owl is the spirit or agent of your Grandma, I am convinced,” wrote my nearly-93-year old professor of classics, who would himself, just seven months later, pass away. He continued, “ Just reading your words made me feel exhilarated, for it is a story at once mysterious and believable. It is one of those events which make life a joy.”
So, was my grandma’s soul in the owl?
Had she sent the owl, to comfort me?
One evening, I worked late,
and wondered if I had missed the owl.
I pulled into my driveway, got out of my car.
I gasped.
Right above the car,
upon a tree branch,
perched the owl.
As if it’s waiting for me
I couldn’t help, but think.
*
It appeared, every single day, for four weeks—
except for one night,
when it poured rain.
I later read that owls don’t like to get their feathers wet.
After exactly 28 days, it disappeared.
(My grandma, by the way, was extremely precise about time.
If the sun forgot
what time to rise, it would get burned by my grandma’s words:
You have kept me waiting.
I don’t like that.)
Was the owl sent by God?
Or nature? In an understanding of my loss so brilliantly intuitive
it defies
all logical explanation?
Was it simply pure chance, that this barred owl—
whose chant sounds remarkably similar to Who Cooks for You?—
which, by the way, is exactly what my grandma might ask me—
chose to alight on a very small spot of earth,
every day for exactly four weeks, where a girl
had lost
her grandmother?
*
All I do know is this:
If I hadn’t stepped outside
of my house, outside,
of myself,
I never would’ve seen the owl.
He couldn’t have reached me on my phone,
tablet, latest reading device.
(Frankly, he wouldn’t want to. As my professor said, The wise owl was the bird of Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Why would such an intelligent creature
leave the splendorous expanse of the endless sky,
for a 7, even 9-inch screen?)
My grandmother passed away— into what?
God? Nature? Random quantum fluctuation?
My one true answer:
It doesn’t matter.
It’s a big gray blur--as soundless, majestic, and ancient,
as the owl’s sudden flight into night—
and that’s the way I like it.
