Near-Nocturne for the Nearsighted

It was through birds, their names,
that I learned closeness. My father’s

presence, a bank vaulted shut, sealed
enclosure, arena of no light, fixed
in an after-houred sliver of what?

It was always like this: our funny game—
pointing to the egret, claiming egret!, then

heron! The cold graze of the binoculars’
metal just as guttural as the sound
of them hitting the deck table after

another sighting, a victory. It was
about the swipe of them, who could

reach the singular pair first
and correctly name the bird. It was always
orange then, sunsetted and warm

when their names huddled in the mud
of the soft summer marsh. It was through

their distance I learned how
to sharpen my focus, what wanted
me to name it and what did not. It was through

the naming that I learned this small
closeness, a point system for collecting.
I deemed the sandpiper favorite,

said I loved it. But as the sky dimmed, they
were out of sight, therefore out
of name’s reach, therefore gone.

Caroline Chavatel is the author of White Noise (Greentower Press, 2019) which won the Laurel Review’s chapbook competition. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast and Poetry Northwest, among others. She is co-founding editor of The Shore and is currently a PHD student at Georgia State University where she is Poetry editor of New South.