l i f e
keeper of the owl
contributions
christopher@30seconds.org
Snowed in. Fading.
I've only myself to console on days like these even though I'm far from alone. Cabin fever sets in early with me, long before the snowfall is complete. Long before I've gone through the beauty of it all. Even while I'm in the shower staring out the window at the white, white world. I lean on the sill and let the steam roll around me, frozen air mixing with the hot humid water vapour in the bathroom. I keep the window open and I can reach out into the snow from the shower. Even then I feel it coming on. Even then.
I read. I have coffee. I read some more. I think of you. And I remember it was like this the day after I became the keeper of the owl.
After that night on the tracks I picked up the owl. It was actually on the way home when I saw it staring at me from deep within the snow covered ivy. I was drunk. Stumbling. Blocks from home and alone on a very quiet amplified night and perhaps that is why I took the owl. I don't know. I never thought much about it at the time. Never thought about the action. I just stepped up and rocked it back and forth a couple of times trying to gauge its weight and then hoisted it over my shoulders like a rifle. I felt relunctant for a moment. I turned and looked at the mercury vapour lights casting their erie shadow over Lake Danial park. The only thing that comes close explaining the feeling I felt at that moment can be found in the last paragraph of Joyce's "The Dead". But for those of you who don't, or won't look it up here's the last sentence.
"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
You really should read the whole paragraph...
So I became keeper of the owl. "The owl" was a concrete statue about three feet high. No matter which direction you looked at it from it stared at you. It knew I shouldn't have it. At night I would watch the owl from across my room. I would turn out the lights and the moonlight illuminated its soft curves, bringing it animation. Life. I knew I couldn't keep it. I knew I couldn't live without it. Without the stare. Without knowing something was always watching me. Watching my things. It began to be an obssesion that to this day I can't explain, only write about.
After about a week the owl went outside, around back of the house, under the steps. It lay there on its side for the better part of a year and a half but it never really left my mind.
Obsequy.
Obstinate.
Obtrude.
Feelings about the owl yeah...you've got those. Looks. Not much. It was worn like an old sandstone sculpture. If you rubbed it small grey grains would cover your hand. It had once been painted, but all that remained were tell-tale flakes here and there. Talons. I remember those. Long and chipped. Used. Vast folded wings crossing gracefully in back. Layer upon layer of concrete feathers. Cold. The owl was always cold. Strange thing is I don't remember its mouth. Nothing at all there. Blank. But the owl never needed a mouth, just those hard eyes. Perfectly shaped and proportioned. Wide. Stone disks that somehow escaped errosion. That's the owl.
Well, one night I couldn't sleep and I found myself about back of the house, under the steps with the owl. I took it around front and sat there with it on the porch smoking cigarette after cigarette. Its weight left a pattern of feathers in my hands just like it had done a year and a half before. I got to thinking about the ivy where I found the owl. The perfect bare dirt circle I'd left there.
I don't know why I did what I did next, but it wasn't out of guilt or respect or a sense of place or belonging, or putting things right with the world or karma. It was somehow a lot more simple than that. I got out my paints, turned on the porch light, and brushed pigment back on the owl the best I could. It was a ritual for me. It had an order and smells unique only to painting. The sweet smell of enamel and the harsh skin peircing odor of thinner. Soft camel hair brushes and rags holding the palettes of previous works. And when completed I sat back and smoked some more. The owl had the same stare and I felt no different. I wasn't even tired.
So I took the owl home.
I placed it back in the ivy.
It's still there to this day...
goodnight 12.29.97
