To the barn owl who lived in the hayloft for a winter, 

or maybe you were only a rumor the farmhands started, something to give the cold a shape other than our own. I never saw you, not once, which is why I’m writing. Do you know they sold the place? Tore down the stalls, even the one where the paint mare foaled, the one I caulked myself with wool and tar that November it got so bad the pipes burst twice. I imagine you’d be gone by now anyway. I imagine you have no concept of property, of the deed changing hands, of the For Sale sign leaning against the gate for months, its red bleeding onto the rust. I’m not writing to ask you to remember the smell of wet alfalfa or the sound of the tin roof contracting in the zero-degree air, a sound like a pistol shot that used to make me sit bolt upright in my bed a half-mile away. I’m writing because the man who bought it, he called me, asked about the wiring in the tack room. He said he found a pile of pellets beneath the rafters, papery skulls thin as eggshells and spines like tiny zippers, and wanted to know what kind of pest I’d let take over. And I wanted to say, that’s not a pest, that is the ghost of something I waited for, that’s the evidence of a life that carried on without my witness. I wanted to say that some nights I’d stand out on the porch and just stare at the black rectangle of the hayloft door hoping to see a flicker of white, a disturbance in the dark, and how that wanting was a kind of warmth. But instead I just told him, oh, it’s probably nothing, rats maybe, you’ll want to get that looked at. I lied to a stranger about you. And I’m sorry. I hope you found a better place, a barn that will stand for a hundred years, one where no one ever thinks to look up. I hope you are just a story I tell myself about a winter that was otherwise nothing but the grind of my own teeth and the price of propane. You were the better silence in that bigger silence. Tell me you were at least there. Tell me I wasn’t just talking to the dark.