As We Look for Owls, My Daughter Asks Me About Depression
BY JAMES DAVIS MAY
The call is a hiss, but we don’t hear it
the way we did a few nights ago
when the three owlets communicated
something to each other as they perched
in three separate trees. It may have been
something about distance, that it was
happening to them, something about
how they needed to use this new voice
to say what they never had to say before,
that their together was ending soon.
Now our flashlights mimic prison lamps
or air raid alerts that find nothing
so they keep on sweeping. Yes, I tell her
when she asks, I wanted to die—
but I was ill and didn’t want to want to die—
and I haven’t felt that way in a long time—
if she ever feels that way, she should tell us.
I’m not sure if I’m being too honest, but
she’s old enough now to read anything
including my face in the dark. The owlets,
I think, might now be owls who have learned
to stay silent as we pass. How much of their language
is for searching and how much of it is
for trying to be found? I imagine them
somewhere in the three-story pines watching us,
two silhouettes that seem to generate light
from our bodies as we move down the path,
looking for something together, listening
to each other and the night, and for those songs
that say, “I’m here. Where are you?”
