By Robert Cording

It just appeared for three days,
then disappeared.

We never saw it arrive,
the closest we ever came to seeing it depart

later in the day was the trembling branch
it always sat on.

For three straight mornings, we woke
to the owl outside our kitchen windows.

It sat with an otherworldly calm,
like a god or a statue of a god

the year our middle son died, warming itself
in the late winter, early morning sun.

Hidden in plain sight,
its mottled and speckled body and wings

became the tree it sat in,
forcing us, again and again, to refocus our vision

to find it. Of course, we wanted it
to mean something—

but when we opened the door
for a closer look, it never moved, never

turned its head, never acknowledged
we were there.

It just hunched in the cold, unflinching,
nape feathers lifting in the wind.

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Robert Cording has published ten collections of poems including Only So Far and Without My Asking (CavanKerry Press) and his newest, In the Unwalled City (Slant, 2022). A book on poetry, the Bible, and metaphor, Finding the World’s Fullness, is also out from Slant. He has received two NEAs in poetry and his poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Southern Review, Poetry, Kenyon Review, The Common, AGNI, Orion, and Best American Poetry 2018.