floats upwards as driven by a powerful draft and, momentarily, it's fixed still in midair. Then massive wings unravel horizontally, strike downwards, upwards, downwards, and I see blanched out bright cut through the dark, gliding above us and away while we lie fixated beneath on the earth, prompt and listening, looking up.

The owl flies over us so close that my hair gets disheveled.

And she walked beneath the wings and lay beneath the owl in flight and she still didn't hear shit.

But when they fly over you, you can hear their wings pushing down the air. You can hear them pushing down the air. And it's not a graceful noise you hear; the sound: it's oil floating up through water, turned audible and flat-noted-a sound that feels sort of counterfeit and against the natural law of things. Me and owls, this is what I hear every time.

"They're so svelte; I'd never know they were so close," she says awed, so caught up seeing it she doesn't even care she heard nothing. I nod. We follow the trail made by deer back to my car.



Water.
The First Year

As an infant in my first year, my skin began to peel off. It started as small pieces, thin and translucent, flaking away from my elbows and knees. Slowly this shedding of skin progressed to large sheets that fell away from all surface areas of my red wrinkled skin. My mom, concerned, took me to the doctor. "How often do you bathe her?" the doctor asked. "Whenever she's dirty. Maybe two or three times a day," my mother answered, sure of her methods. The doctor was shocked. "This baby doesn't have a rash. You are washing the skin off her. Let her get dirty." When she is telling me this decades later, we both laugh. I always wondered if this first year of life (preceded by the nine months of antigravity isolation in the fluid of the womb) is responsible for my affinity with water.

Most summers of my childhood I spent swimming in lakes and oceans. My skin cracked from lack of oil, my hair dried out from the constant sun and salt. After a day of swimming in the Atlantic I would go to bed, and as soon as I closed my eyes my inner ear would replay the rising and falling of waves. I was literally rocked to sleep.

On land I was clumsy. It was as if the motor neurons were massaging my muscles

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