One has only to watch a collector handle the objects in his glass case. As he holds them in his hands, he seems to be seeing through them into their distant past as though inspired.

—Walter Benjamin

It is the twist in the red tail’s neck that makes it so appealing. The way I can almost read death in the curve of the spine. Feathers still cling to the open wings, just as some probably still cling to the branches of the pine where the bird was found on East Mountain here in western Massachusetts, where the slope dissolves into a boulder field. My boyfriend, Ben, and I keep it out in the garage because it’s too funky to keep in the house, a sweet sickly smell emanating from between the bones, yet we like to go and look at it periodically. It’s something special to hold a bird of prey like that. Whenever Ben’s two kids come across it in the garage, they always wrinkle their noses and ask, “Why do you guys keep that thing, anyway?”

We felt the same about the dead eastern screech owl Ben came home with the first year we were together. We were taking the first tentative steps of our relationship while living sixteen hours apart. He’d found the owl in the attic of a house he was renovating—it was hanging from a shredded curtain at a dingy window—and he put it in a paper bag and left it in the garage, knowing I’d want to see it next time I visited. Some of the feathers were still emerging from the keratin pins—a juvenile. I imagined it hovering like a moth at the window’s dim light, looping itself over and over into the lethal threads of ruined curtain. So close. When I saw him next we tried to untangle it, but the strands were wrapped too tightly around the neck, around one wing.

I ended up taking it back to Michigan with me, the paper bag on the floor in the backseat. I drove it across the unending flat expanse of New York State, over Niagara Falls, across southern Ontario. I took the eastern screech owl into the Midwest. We turne...