Stopped on the back road to watch
by headlight glow a pygmy owl devour a vole.
A nearby teasel pod blown from the shoulder
as big as the owl, bird
less concerned about headlights and car
than the thorny pod was. The bird went about the toil
of evisceration as though a Subaru were just another star,
but eventually it gathered up the carcass
in its beak and flew to a roadside cedar fencepost,
where the light was dimmer but still there.
Spotted head tugged a lash from the gutsnarl,
drops of blood or tissue flashed as they fell in the light.
And then beginning to be visible—
just clearing the second fencerail—
the cross-hatched glistening diamonds of a rattlesnake,
climbing, otherwise unseen.

The memory is almost false
but is also mostly true,
since the tires on the Mercury were clearly whitewalls,
although the car was green. Or possibly blue.

What I remember best is my father,
who took the picture—new car, mother, sister, me.
He wore an Easter suit the color of mortar,
shade of the sidewalk that scraped my scabbed knee.

Father’s suit and sidewalk the same pale gray
on the palette that holds everything we see—
’58 Mercury, a family, noon on a spring day,
Easter, in the foreground a shining silver peony.