Calling

~Matthew Roth Who are you? Me too. Who are you? Me too. In the winter half light, each breath silvers, falls, as our feet fall— we’re barely married half a year— across the bone-hard drifts of our back acre. We’re moving toward the dark the border woods reserve against the twin-bright pall of snow and moon. At the edge, just where the ragged underbrush creeps out to claim another crust of clearing, we stop. I call. Everything listens. Through the tangle of shadows, a little east and far off, an echo, then another, nearer still. We dare not move, though I feel your hand in the crook of my arm squeeze a little tighter, and I recall our first time owling, how you joked that I was “wooing” you, and later, when the wood I’d stood up wouldn’t burn, you smiled and warmed your hands above it anyway. The shadows shiver a little, deep, and then the louder, clearer song again, strangely human, as if the owl sympathized with our rough, inadequate transcription, our trick against forgetting. Who are you? I feel your hand, strangely warm, on my arm. I open my eyes. You are there, half-asleep beside me in the bed where we have slept together almost ten full years. The red line on the monitor leaps. Me too. It’s Silas, not yet two, calling out from his crib the words he’s learned from Birding by Ear. This is his favorite, the Great Horned Owl, a kind of solo call and response. Hearing this way, in the blue-black fog of six o’clock, awakened from my careless dream, I’m almost overcome by fear and love. In his tiny, sing-song liturgy, I hear his certain loneliness, his waking to a future full of empty, dimlit rooms. But also this: his perfect faith that somebody at last will come and lift him into morning. I rise before he calls again, and when he sees my shadow fall across the crack beneath his door he chirps, in his new voice, my name, the name my place in life has earned, and I, like some great bird a-wing, swoop down on him, whispering his own name in return. ~~~~~ Next