What happens if your lover is both larger and fiercer than you?

Scops owl and the invisible vet

His orange moons mismatch; one discolours, darkens,

Turns brown, retreating beneath the lid as if suddenly shy

Of the light, of its ‘otherness’, as if the weight of the lid

And the cares of being smally feathered with a larger mate

Who scolds as an iron scalds, were too much.

Today was my third journey in search of a solution

In between eye-drops and grasps of soft plumage.

As I removed him, his mate gazed at me, her lanterns firing

And she laid down a layer of this poem

With all the fury of her tree-bark frown;

Her disapproval of everything, of me, brooms, mops,

Daily cage cleans and trays of fresh newspaper

Burned from her corneas. I left with time in hand for traffic

But not the roadworks with a five-mile drawback

That set the sat nav recalculating my arrival as stationary.

My watch ticked past ‘time to spare’, ‘timing tight’,

‘Timing crucial’ and ‘time out’. I phoned first for delay,

Then in despair as I turned towards home an alternative way;

A two-hour drive for no purpose, as the idea of a vet evaporated.

My little scops owl opened the lid of his dud eye in surprise.