This Owl Did Not

 

Talking to an old friend who was in Vicenza, Italy. “What’s that like?” I ask.  I have a look at the map and consider the location, between Venice and Verona.  He’s dismissive about the food.  It must be achingly wonderful.  The stock photos all have a tower.  I look, of course.  The Torre Bissara, standing eighty meters high must have been otherworldly in 1174, when it was completed, not long after Angkor Wat, or the establishment of the Southern Song.  I lose track of what we’re talking about, gazing at the pictures of Vicenza.

A big, barred owl dashes dramatically across my line of sight, some thirty yards down the ahead.  Instinctively I stand and gaze out to the left, into the canopy to see if I can spy him.  He’s gone.  Now we’re on to his time in Dubai and our mutual interest in the history of Persia.  Up to my left are the Cambridge Histories of China.  I suggest to him that he should join me.  A dream deferred is to buy the complementary series for Persia and slowly stitch together that remarkable webbing that connects the Mediterranean to the Bohai Sea. 

 

Before I can enter “Shiraz” or “Isfahan” into Google Images, the owl lands, just like that, right in front of me there on the porch.  He’s only ten feet or so in front, pulling in his wings, turning his head as only owls do.  I stand up again and fiddle for my camera, undoing the password, locating the app.  I want to show my friend in real time.  But he turns and flies before I can do anything.  Unlike the “strange beast” in Jia Yi’s poem “The Owl Rhapsody” this owl did not come inside, nor did we learn what “it wished to say.”

“Yeah.  It was huge.  You should have seen it.  Will be amazing to get you here. Look, you can stay here.  We’ve plenty of room.”  Actually, meeting up with people seems like such an odd anachronism.  Content for now to keep everything, even intimate encounters at a distance.  How much longer before we’re really making plans to travel once again?

 

 

 

Saturday, 02/20/21