By Debbie Lim,
You see through me instantly,
melting away branches, shadow.
Meanwhile you wear that primitive mask:
as if shocked to the bone. It’s a floating
art you practice, levering that binary face
over fields, between gaps in the trees.
And when you call, a hollowness enters
all things: emptied receptacles.
Night is a long tendon you tear through,
snow your pretty accomplice.
When you met me from behind, all I felt
was a regular wind, how the world grew
small and for the first time—
I noticed the moon.
An earlier version of ‘Meeting the Owl’ was previously published in Magma (UK) as a commended entry in the Magma Poetry Competition.