Sunday Pages: "Night Owl"

A poem by M. Wyrebek

Dear Reader,

One of my favorite books is Poet’s Choice, a collection of columns about poetry written for the Washington Post by Edward Hirsch—himself a fine poet. Each of its 130 short chapters focuses on the work of a single poet, or poets grouped together in logical ways. The poet’s choices, and his commentary, are superb. Through this book I was introduced to the work of many poets I’d never heard of before—and one, the late Roland Flint, who taught my Introduction to Poetry class at Georgetown but who never let on that he was himself a world-class poet.

Also, I just like the book itself: the object. It’s shaped like a novel, and doesn’t have the unpleasant heft of the typical poetry anthology, which heaviness bothers my wrists. The cover is simple and appealing. Even the typeface is beautiful, the contrast of black ink to cream paper calling out to be read.

The second part of Hirsch’s book features the work of his contemporaries. I was flipping through Poet’s Choice a few weeks ago—it’s the sort of book you flip through—and came to chapter 104, on a poet named M. Wyrebek. The poem printed there, “Night Owl,” blew me away and brought me to tears. I was transported to the dark road through the dark cornfield—and felt the power, and the ultimate hopefulness, of the dark night of her soul. Since then, I can’t get the poem out of my mind.

It opens with an epigram from Rilke:

You are nearing the land that is life.
You will recognize it by its seriousness.
—Rilke

And then the poem proper begins:

Driving my bad news the back way home
I know I’m in the land that is life
when I reach my favorite stretch of road—fields
flat and wide where corn appears soon after
planting, the soil tilled, night-soaked
and crumbled into fists.

Faced with processing the bad news, she takes her time, heads to primordial territory. This is a place of growth, of healing, of comfort, of rebirth.

Ferguson’s barn is somewhere
at the end of this long arm of tar
and as I near it, something grazes the back
passenger-side door, luffs parallel to my car—
a huge owl on headlight spray floating,
holding night over the hood to see
if this moving thing is real, alive,
something to kill—then gliding in
close as if to taste glass.

The road is reduced to its primary element—tar. The only manmade structure, the true north on her internal compass, is far away; she’s not quite sure where. She’s in the soup now. And that’s when the owl—the titular night owl; here, this is not a hackneyed idiom for someone who stays up late—appears, hovering alongside her car like one of those imperial fighters from Star Wars:

The road levitates, buffeted on a surf
of light, the fog-eaten farm disappearing
as I ride into starlessness, cells conspiring
so I am bright-flecked and uplifted—is this
what it feels like to be chosen—to be taken
under the wing of something vast
that knows its way blindly?

This reminds me of the end of “Angels in America,” also written in the nineties. We are told that there are no angels in America, but ultimately, the angel appears: suddenly, unexpectedly, bringing hope and comfort to a sick and dying man. An owl is not the usual guise of an angel—but owls are associated with the goddess Athena and bring wisdom. Is this / what it feels like to be chosen is so powerful because it suggests that the narrator has never before been among that number. She is left to wonder and to marvel at this new experience.

Given what I’ve learned about Wyrebek, I like to think that the scene described in the poem really happened. The “M.” stands for Michele. And the “bad news” she received was likely medical in nature. Her too-short life was a constant struggle against cancer. Aside from Hirsch’s book, the only commentary I found on her came from, of all places, Academic Medicine: The Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges. In 2004, a few months after her death, Ronald Domen, M.D. wrote:

As a teenager in high school, Michele Wyrebek was diagnosed with osteosarcoma that necessitated a leg amputation. She graduated from Vassar College, and then earned an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. After graduate school, she was awarded a Bread Loaf fellowship and taught a class at the 1999 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a writing retreat sponsored by Middlebury College. However, her cancer was relentless. She developed lung metastases and underwent surgical removal of one of her lungs. Recurrent infections at the site of the removed lung complicated her illness and required more surgeries in an attempt to repair the damage. Her disease consumed a great deal of her life before it ultimately took her life on February 5, 2003, at the age of 42.

Many of Michele Wyrebek’s poems are about hospitals, her struggle with cancer, and her interactions with physicians and nurses. She wrote about the pain and suffering she endured, both physical and emotional, and the loneliness that comes with a serious illness. At the same time she wrote about the beauty she found in nature, in other patients, and in herself. During those years of struggle with her cancer, several of her poems were published in medical journals such as JAMA and The Western Journal of Medicine. Her award winning book of poetry, fittingly called Be Properly Scared, was published in 1996, and provides a great deal of insight to her disease and illness.

It never fails to amaze me that lines on a page written by a dead poet can retain the power to thrill me, or to move me to tears. Creepy billionaires obsess over living forever, but this—this is true immortality. Shakespeare put it best, as Shakespeare will—how can anyone die “[w]hen in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st:”

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

I would very much like to read Wyrebek’s book of poems, Be Properly Scared, but it is out of print, and I was unable to even track down a used copy. The title of her collection is from a line by Flannery O’Connor, and is remarkably good advice for living in the dark night of the soul that is 2023: “Be properly scared and go on doing what you have to.”

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ICYMI

Fascinating discussion on The Five 8 on Friday night with our guest, Shireen Mitchell:

The episode also featured one of our (in my humble opinion) best-ever karaoke parodies. This idea was suggested by a friend of the show. My wife, the very talented Stephanie St. John, made my rather pedestrian piano and vocal track more Beatles-y, and Chunk provided the dazzlingly funny animation:

If you’re so inclined, you can also share it on Twitter.

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Photo credit: Stein Egil Liland.