You say they were slow to learn. The brains of owls
    Went down in your opinion through long hours
       Of unresponsive staring
 While you showed them how to act out minor parts
    In the world of Harry Potter. Come with me now
       Into the night, perch motionless, balanced
 On a branch above a thicket, where every choice
    Of a flight path is more narrow
       Than your broad wing-span, more jagged
 And crooked than patterns of interrupted moonlight
    On twigs and fallen leaves, where what you take
       In silence with claws and beak to stay alive
 Knows everything about you except your tricks,
    Except where you're going to be in the next instant
       And how you got there without anyone's help

I don’t know about you, but I find most of today’s published poetry (ie, poetry published in non-poetry magazines) either too predictable or too private. Finally, here’s one—from the current issue of The New Republic—that is neither.

The Harry Potter stories feature owls who carry messages. To do this in the movies, an “owl wrangler” has trained a number of owls to do various owl tricks. Through the wonders of digital photography, these tricks are multiplied, and one owl flying from here to there become dozens flying within a vast building. You can watch the owls being trained and see their flights become movies in a TV feature that’s been shown on one or another of the “Discovery-type” channels. It appears that the wrangler does not greatly admire owl intelligence. It also appears that the poet does not greatly admire wrangler intelligence.

Like all good nature poems, this one succeeds by being perfectly accurate in describing the natural world and through that accuracy tells us about more than just that world.

About the poet, I am embarrassed to say I knew nothing, nor do we have any of his other works published. A search discloses the extent of my ignorance, since David Wagoner (b. 1926) is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and editor of the journal Poetry Northwest. The author of ten novels, he has also written many volumes of poetry, the latest of which is Walt Whitman Bathing (1996).

— Alan Kornheiser

Links

Here’s the Academy of American Poets page on Wagoner:

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=152