Mascots — Blackbird Archive

← v16n1, Spring 2017

Mascots

Late, when the clock’s numbers

are a red blur, the screech owl

woke me with its baleful

rapid wailing, the bluest,

blackest side of any music

I’ve heard. I lay there wishing

again for some charm I knew

so I could roll out of bed

and flip one shoe heel up,

or turn my pants pockets

inside out as if to show that owl

there was nothing of mine

it needed, and send it off

through the dark. Even thinking of it

as a shaggy college mascot

with size-twelve feet, the kind

they sell in bookstores with

the school’s logo on its chest

and eyes like gold saucers

in its cat face is no help when

it wants me to be its mascot,

wants me to sit on the darkest

shelf in its hollow tree somewhere.

nature animals solitude humor

Brendan Galvin

Brendan Galvin is the author of sixteen collections of poems, including the following titles from Louisiana State University Press: The Air’s Accomplices (2015); Whirl is King (2008); Ocean Effects (2007); and Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005 (2005), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. His translation of Sophocles’s Women of Trachis (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) appeared in the Penn Greek Drama Series. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Sotheby Prize of the Arvon Foundation (England), the Iowa Poetry Prize, and Poetry’s Levinson Prize, as well as the first OB Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum. He has been Wyndham Robertson Writer in Residence in the MA program at Hollins University, Coal Royalty Distinguished Writer in Residence in the MFA program at The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and Whichard chairholder in the Humanities at East Carolina University.