Quivering Anticipation - A Barred Owl Hunts

Recording "Quivering Anticipation" in Jersey City, Walter Parks urged my best country voice. Hailing from Western North Carolina, I effortlessly adopted my native accent. The poem embodies a moonless night in Maine, watching stars when a Barred owl, hunting silently, momentarily eclipsed them. For more on my work, visit www.jamesnave.com. Quivering Anticipation If a patch of black slips across the Milky Way's billion years of light, creating an absence of stars peppering no longer down into the aperture of your eyes. It is an owl hunting the edges. Substance on silence in the deciduous green of continuous hardwoods. It flies over the suspicious field mouse, nibbling grain. Muffled feathers pushing into some last second of existence that hovers in a thin vapor of quivering anticipation. Layers of then and now penetrable in the moment between living and dying when memory enters primal breath, peels away desire, and throws us into the unfolding light where creatures scatter in a simple night of wings and feeding.