She takes topsoil on her morning walk,
to turn it over, to worry the word,
to try and scratch a layer off.
Hoping to make an ofrenda to the mother,
to bury and unbury it
in the earth like a bone.

But she can’t open it,
can’t get it dirty enough,
cannot get the top off.

So she carries it
through the roll of green-gold hills
growing discontent. Upset
by the way top puts a lab coat on
and starts prodding soil like a patient,
examining for fertility,
prescribing out of scarcity,
speaking of only what it can see.

She feels ungrounded, small—
like a girl alone in a doctor’s office,
until a man standing in the grass path
nearby, head thrown back,
searching the top of a sixty-foot pine,
breaks her thrall.

“Are you looking for someone?”
she cries, desperate for the cure of specificity.
He could say flicker, or raven, or even squirrel,
and she would be satisfied.

“Owl.” he replies.
“This is her tree.”

And somehow, she finds the ground again
in the word owl, in his morning search
for a night bird,
in his curiosity.