Found from Minnesota to Quebec and Mississippi, Eastern Screech Owl is a monument to human naming and noticing, marking various groups' languages, dialects, metaphors and observations with its collection of names. According to Allan W. Eckert, The Owls of North America, it is called:

demon owl, dusk owl, ghost owl ("so expertly avoiding collision with intertwined branches that it appears to go through them"), gray owl, Le Petit-Duc de l'Est, Little Dukelet, little-eared owl, little horned owl, little owl, mottled owl, mouse owl ("prey it most favors"), quavering owl, red owl, scops owl, scritch owl, shivering owl (for its call, its effect on the superstitious, and "because young nestling Screech Owls are subject to severe attacks of shivering"), spirit owl, squinch owl, trilling owl, whistling owl.


In one way, these names pin to the creature and become monuments to human times and places, as though a regional culture could fly through the woods and return to a nest.

In another way, the variation itself is a complicated pin that marks the owl's own changeability. It can be a range of colors and shapes (when apprehensive, "the owl can elongate its perched body until it has stretched upward nearly half again its normal perched height"), and its call is really a dialect in itself, full of versions and individuation.

Years pass, but dusk is still "the time of day when it is most often seen"--the very time when a sighting is possible, but difficult.

The weaver is folding laundry.

Deep into the basket, not off the top, she reaches and grabs one shirt or one napkin, plucks its corners strategically, whips it precisely, moves her pinching grip to its centerline, lets it fall against itself, rotates and repeats, then piles it with a gentle thump on a stack of likes.

It's raining for the first time in seven weeks.

She stands in a small, ground-level room, one shoulder to the single window, her gaze landing halfway between the small towers of cloth on the table and the whitewashed wall.

The weaver thinks of the tulips, months past blooming but still able to take the water where they lie, wide-eyed, in the ground. She thinks of the rain falling right into the puzzle of the dry creekbed. And it must be washing dust off such small things, broken bricks, iron pegs, wood shavings left in the grass where someone was making a bucket.

Though it is late August, this pin is behaving like October. Therefore, it is time-traveling. It is making itself into a monument for an approaching season. In its sphere, one feels clear and chilly. The history of fall--all falls layered--is pierced by this pin.

Inside the house, we paint paths on the floor by walking.

In a half sleep, the painter is recalling other works:

They seem good-natured and their opposite curtains make half a sphere.



Their dog is as long-nosed as they are.



Large and careful decorations.



"Couple in a Garden"



Man and child



Two titled "Cutout Profile of a Young Lady"



They are married. About 1835



Both in a forward style. They are unacquainted



Carpet, accoutrements, inscriptions. "Aged 22." "Aged 18."



"Intimate Conversation"

Dear Christopher John,

The night you were born we stood in the laundromat folding our clothes together, and the door was open to the heat and the bright dinnertime light. And we drove over blue ridges, one mountain lighter behind the closer one, and past the gardens and horses and creeks and into the valley, over the bridge, up to the farm and there was a rainbow leaping off dark sky.

And we drove home with our sunflowers, peppers, potatoes, coxcomb, and put them all away and looked at our plants and our cat. And there was a pile of dirty dishes which I started to do. And your Uncle John weighed our tomatoes, one batch seven pounds, the other batch eight pounds, and you weighed six pounds. And when the dishes were clean we boiled water and cut Xs in the tomatoes and boiled them briefly and took off their skins. And the skins made an angular mound in a blue bowl, their flesh was firm and sometimes it broke and cicada sounds were rising and falling outside the back door.

And three big bowls of boiled tomatoes slowly became six clear jars of skinned tomatoes, as we listened to music and slipped off the skins and toasted you with champagne and got tomato pulp on the outside of the glasses, and seeds and juice puddled on the counter and the big canning kettle started to heat and murmur on the stove. And we waved a moth away from the fragrant tomatoes. And we sealed the jars and put them in the boiling kettle and covered it up to wait.

And it was late and black and heat came off the steaming stove and in from the deep summer night, cicadas, owls, crickets, silent raccoons nosing through the weeds. And this day, July 30, became a pin on the calendar because you were born, in Florida, to Sarah and Chris. And we made a dinner with sweet corn and meat and yellow summer squash, and ate at our table under our ceiling. And the wait was over and we pulled the jars of tomatoes out with oven mitts. And I wish for you a night like this.

And the next day the moonflower bloomed.

The painter, nursing a blockage of imagery, is passing between the springhouse and his room, and notices--on the bottom rail of a board fence--a suspended skink. It's a four-inch-long lizard caught, by its tail, in a dense hanging cobweb.

It isn't moving; the web is tightened like a sleeve around the narrow point of its tail, its legs are relaxed and its eyes are open. It's inches away from the ground, the fence, or any other solid thing. It and the web are a tiny construction which turns freely like a breeze-blown pendulum.

From its tail to its head, the five lines on its black back turn electric periwinkle blue to the yellow of a daffodil, an even and surprising spectrum. A pulse beats on both sides of its neck.

The painter touches the web and the skink leaps into a small fury of motion, further trapping itself, but he frees it and watches it zip under a brick, where it freezes.

He continues on toward his room, cold spring water in his hair, his brush full of red.