Robert Savino Oventile

Robert Savino Oventile hikes Eaton Canyon regularly. His poetry has appeared in The New Delta Review, Upstairs at Duroc, and The Denver Quarterly. He is coauthor with Sandy Florian of Sophia Lethe Talks Doxodox Down (Atmosphere, 2021). Robert is the current Poet Laureate of Local News Pasadena.

a waterfall in the forest

Rainbow Trout

In the background, a stand of wooden derricks pump crude, while in the foreground, among pits of pitch-black ooze belching methane, diggers for fossils toil. These labors will lift your tiny bones from lower strata also holding mammoth tusks.

When sheets of ice ruled the north, where some of your far kin found refuge in a still-running river, some of your near kin swam in the canyon stream flowing amidst boulders and scrub, high-circling condors surveying the water’s meander to the ocean.

A swimming trout implies its habitat, that habitat’s biosphere, that biosphere’s configuration of the Earth system, and their relations and feedbacks at scales of time short and long and of space large and small. Observe the finny creature with care.

A camera peeks into the water to capture the pinkish-red band along the side, the blackish spots numerous above the band, less numerous below, the splotch of dirty yellow abutting the upper tail fin, the almost white belly and, overall, the silvery-gray.

Above the well-known waterfall, past which the streambed continues up the snaking gorge, a deep pool in those isolate upper reaches has become for rainbow trout a refugium guarded by steep canyon walls. A mayfly lands on the placid surface. Splish.

Poetry & Photo: © Robert Savino Oventile 2024


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a bright orange insert on a rock

Tarantula Hawk and Host

Wings orange, reddish, body bluish black with a stinger, antennae orange, six legs, eyes deep black, a tarantula hawk flies low to the ground, circling forward and back along a deer trail. The flight is noiseless, the circling patient.

Eight legs, eight eyes, fangs, body greyish black, hairy, a tarantula scuttles from a burrow and then settles among some pebbles shaded by the buckwheat adjacent the trail. The tarantula hawk lands near the spider and begins to clean her antennae.

Has a hiker ever fallen prone across this trail, thrashing, emitting agony’s sounds, uncontrollably, continuously, for about five minutes, electric pain crowding from the mind all else and revealing depths of vulnerability before unimagined?

With her antennae the wasp caresses the tarantula, who enters a quietude foreshadowing profounder stillness. She withdraws, cleans her antennae, approaches again and again caresses the spider. Then the attack, the brief grapple, the sting.

In the tarantula’s abdomen, the larva grows and feeds, feeds and grows, and, to prolong the host’s life in paralysis, defers to last the vital organs. Pupation follows. A few weeks later, from the tarantula, dead now, emerges a tarantula hawk.

Poetry & Photo: © Robert Savino Oventile 2024


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A building with a mountain in the background

Canyon Bridges

Daybreak at the crossing. The icy rivulet flows somewhat broader than a stride. Strange. You pause, and then you leap. At the apex of your quick bow over the murmuring water, tingles envelop you, from your bare head to your sandaled feet.

Over a labyrinth of posts, braces, and crossbeams (trestles in frozen march across the canyon), a flatbed truck rolls slowly, carrying upright, crated & cradled, a circular mirror, diameter 100 inches, 4.5 tons of glass. The procession ripples in the water pooled below.

Lighter than air, a promise arcs overhead, transparent to the sun’s rays. The empty sky above the high rock walls, the alders swaying in the breeze, the stream gleaming among wavering shadows, all testify: in the end, no one can drive their dreams away.

When floodwaters stove the trestle bridge, a Throop graduate recalled envisioning a grace-heavy arch curving above the streambed, the abutments firm in rock, in earth, with the deck on spandrels set to the harmonies of the graduate’s dancing numbers.

A plain girder bridge with two piers. Thick concrete sinewed with rebar. Simple lines. There, under dense gray clouds, my father leans over the guardrail to watch the cutwaters battle the torrent. I listen to boulders thud past and downstream.

Poetry & Photo: © Robert Savino Oventile 2024


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