I hear your screeches in the early night, when the air is like an indigo lagoon, and we all begin to be shadows that communicate submerged in an essential silence.
Before recognizing you, I do not know whether you are a wounded lynx riding on a cloud, a flying fox, a bodyless howl, or the cry of a spirit that comes to the edge of its coven; such is the unsettled power of your song.
Your small body does not correspond to that diminutive size, as if within the reach of a fist — a feathered fist — there could fit a bolt of these storms with which autumn has begun. But Jupiter is not your god, rather Athena: she chose you to accompany you through the night, goddess of wisdom, of crafts and war, and therefore of courage.
That is why, whenever you appear, I always wonder what message you bring about my struggles, and whether I might live with less ignorance within the boundless unknown where humans draw their limits.
You have come to visit me three times. The first burst into my greenhouse and began to flap against the glass, trying to escape through the deceitful transparency, which was really a prison. You nearly sacrificed yourself to show me that simple lesson.
The second was on the plain of the wheat fields. I was groping toward twilight, wondering if, to overcome that deception, the solitary path might be better, and you watched from a granary in search of a large grasshopper or a mole.
Soon I discovered you were not alone. Your partner kept watch with you, and, abandoning the hunt, you both flew toward me and began to trace circles over my head, to instill in me the idea that evolution is impossible without another who completes you and confronts you.
The condition is mutual aid, supreme attention, and restraint, to love the silence. Athena dispensed with the crow because it talked too much and chose you, little owl, as perpetual companion. It is no surprise, then, that you become scarcer with each passing day. It is not only because our poisons still strip away your prey, but because our era speaks too much and in every one of our pockets a crow flickers.
One more time you visited me. You perched at the foot of the lush fig tree and there you kept gazing at me. I stood a couple of meters away, spellbound, trying not to move an inch so you wouldn’t be frightened.
But it was not you who was afraid. You fixed me with your yellow eyes, and I found myself wrapped in that golden substance that compelled me to hover at the edge of your pupils, as if before two inflamed wells.
Then I saw inside you the figure of a man. He moved slightly, back and forth, like a pendulum. He counted the time and his fate accumulated beneath his feet, like a stain that spread across the floor, overflowing from its origin, underutilized.
As if that destiny were pushing him in the opposite direction of gravity from the very gravity to which the man clung with stubborn tenacity.
As if, oh, bird of Athena, you were telling me —even within your yellow eyes—: only the one who loves the silence of the night can listen. Only he who overcomes all his fears begins to know. Only the one who knows, truly knows, takes flight.