A Poem for a Thursday #242

Greg Pape is the author of a number of award-winning poetry books. His poems have been read on NPR and featured by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. He served as the poet laureate of Montana from 2007-2009. His poems are frequently inspired by nature, travel, music, and memory.

An owl calls across the river.

Another answers farther downstream.

Stars glitter through the branches of pines
and on the back of the river.

He sits still, leaning against a tree.
The river comes a little closer.

Deer come closer.

He hears the riffle upstream
and the one down. Water eddies
and runs susurrous in his mind.

Looking up into the sweeping current of starlight,
fish idle and hold against the flow.

Now, just above his head, a third owl calls—
six blue notes like circles widening on the surface of a pool,
picked up and repeated across the river,
then down away.

The sound goes around, an echo, an eddy
in the dark before dawn.

He listens, slips his hand into the cold river,
turns it over, palm up, to cup the water
to hold stars.

The River Comes Closer
Greg Pape