Ann Agnes Colwell

FEEDING THE FOX

Wild things trust not to trust. So you crinkle the wrapper and she sharpens her ears, tenses hope down against fear, forces herself still. In the pointed puzzle of her face, she empties gold eyes of all but appetite. What you drop is sustenance on a cold morning and it falls into the clearing of dune grass. To get it she must walk exposed, away from the pines: her hesitation a nod to pretend choice. You both know the bargain and the cost, showing and coaxing, and what protection is lost in each step.

CONCEIT

There is an owl in the hickory. It is not my heart, anyone's heart. It blends into shivering dead leaves, hummocks of dry grass, patches of old snow. The wind that talks incessantly of loss can't make this any less real for all it knows or doesn't know. At night round eyes scour empty fields. Black talons grip some small life - not a memory, no - something with blood, a rabbit or mole. Talons tear. Before the wind can turn the night to words, the owl feeds, now, before sound dies away.

TRANSLATION

I would pass this morning from my mouth to yours, feel your tongue take words and know the image will root in your cells, grow into you. Under your ribs the first touch of light like a carpenter's line drawn between ocean and sky, the meteor shower streaking through Cassiopeia just before sunrise. This is my gift for love's end recompense for the days we won't spend learning each other by heart. To the west, the waning moon settles in your left wrist. In your dreams, two great horned owls sound the greying dunes, navigate the vanishing night in each other's cries.

SNOW GEESE

In a field of static silence you say "snow geese." White wings black- tipped, like they were dipped in ink, flash radiance from here to the dark horizon of your absence. I want a charm to bring you back, to fill the gone field of stubble with their shining. I want their long mating and raucous cries. I want your voice white-winged tipped with dark delight crying "Snow geese!" to the child beside you who turns to see, just in time, the ordinary mystery of flight. Anne Agnes Colwell is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware. Her book, Inscrutable Houses: Metaphors of the Body in the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, was published by the University of Alabama Press in 1997. Her first book of poems, Believing Their Shadows, has been a finalist for the University of Wisconsin's Brittingham Prize, the Anhinga Prize, New Issues Poetry Prize and the Quarterly Review of Literature. Her poems have appeared in several journals, including, most recently, California Quarterly, Evansville Review, Phoebe, Eclectic Literary Forum, Southern Poetry Review, and Writer's Voice. Poetry is also at the heart of her research interests and she has published several essays concerning American poets, including an article in Connecticut Review on Anne Bradstreet and Affliction/Conversion Narrative and an article in Journal X about Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Fish."

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