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 display in a store

Insulators

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At the room’s east end, behind glass, on a mat woven of khaki reed strips, among a haphazard group of clay and stone artifacts, a finely knapped obsidian spear point rests, black, symmetrical, sharp, as ready for use now as when mammoths strode.

Against the room’s west wall, a section of pine utility pole holds on four wooden crosspieces dozens of insulators, mainly glass, blue, grey, green, clear, a few ceramic, black, white, black and white. Atop the pole a stuffed porcupine squats in profile.

Most often dark, silent, shut, the room harbors stillness, the display case’s stasis, the porcupine’s repose. A raccoon ever seeks to warm its forepaws at an iron cookstove ever cold. Yet reveries haunt the room, remaining distinct in their vistas.

Break an insulator on the concrete floor and knap a shard of glass into an arrowhead. Giant ground sloths forage for leaves, dire wolves range in packs, condors wheel high, all amidst ample scrub and woodlands near mountains with thick snow caps.

Place an insulator on the reception counter to hold a loop of the ethernet cable and boot the laptop. The ocean encroaches inland, chaparral arches the interstate here and there, office towers sustain the touch of time, all under a sky without contrails.

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.

Poetry & Photo: © Robert Savino Oventile 2023

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A bird sitting on a ledge

Ravens

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Gliding over floodwaters, a raven scans the horizon while another listens to the wind. None of their mocking deceits are of use now, just imagining dry ground, mountainside perches in dead trees, and all the carrion the rippling expanse will yield.

On a sloped mesa brushed by warm breezes and thick with poppies in bloom, yellow and orange, look to the red sun low over the blue water and remember, deep in the canyon, just past the gray boulders, the two black birds pecking and picking at the eyes and ears.

The most impeccable mimic courts mockery. To see and listen to the point of synesthesia may imply concord but also blind silence, silent blindness. Yet a void of sight and sound, opening, might allow audiovisuals to arrive and remain distinct.

Two circle back and observe, chattering and wing gesturing. They dip over a ridge. Returning, one carries a small bottle, which the bird drops to the road. The bottle breaks. The other lands, grabs a shard with its beak, takes off. The birds fly from view.

After a canyon walk at dusk, return to the car, get in, lock the doors, crack a window, switch off the interior light, tilt back the seat. Shrouded by heavily tinted glass, sink into the plush black upholstery. Breath slows. Eyes close. A raven peers into the darkness.

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.

Poetry & Photo: © Robert Savino Oventile 2023

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A close up of a bird

California Condor

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A silent milling black cloud ravenously at a beached whale carcass, crops filling to the point of balking flight, a rare feast, an echo of what had been common tableaux when mammoths fattened on grass and fell to old age or saber-toothed cats or obsidian points.

A few decades back, in the canyon, conservationists found old shell fragments where “the General” had hatched now over a century ago, so named by ornithologists, who took him to the Willamette Valley then to an east coast zoo, where he died young.

Return. High in the canyon, quiet pools below the upper falls await the shadow of broad wings and again would host the image of soaring, however briefly. Return, and though homecoming entangles two species, their gifts remain distinct.

To each a number, a name, a tag, a tracker, an online profile, a genealogy, a list of offspring, biological and foster, a relationship status, and if so with whom, a bio, a hatch date and location, a death date eventually, a dataset augmenting in the cloud.

With a cobalt sky above, the San Gabriels below, and San Gorgonio to the east capped white, ride a thermal, turn, turn, sight the Mojave’s khaki and the Pacific’s blue, then plunge down toward some crows in the canyon circling a patch of green.

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.

Poetry: © Robert Savino Oventile 2023
Photography: Kelly VanDellen / Adobe

California Condor Read More »

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