I remember the heavenly barn owl
flying across pale-faced fields
and into the woods outside my window.
I was sitting in a chair. Then I wasn’t.
The water I drank rushed
through the aqueducts of every cell
in my body no longer a body, but a spiral
of light lifting from my bones, the shadow
of a boy no longer me, standing below
and waving. I like to think I flew that night,
that black-feathered wings sprouted from
my back, that I soared between shadows
of moonlight. But I know how closely the crow
latches onto a body, burying its claws in the flesh
of anything floating in and out of life.