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Arthur Stringer
The opal afternoon
Is cool, and very still.
A wash of tawny air,
Sea-green that melts to gold,
Bathes all the skyline, hill by hill.
Out of the black-topped pinelands
A black crow calls,
And the year seems old!
A woman from a doorway sings,
And from the valley-slope a sheep-dog barks,
And through the umber woods the echo falls.
Then silence on the still world lies,
And faint and far the birds fly south,
And behind the dark pines drops the sun,
And a small wind wakes and sighs,
And Summer, see, is done!
I STOOD in my window
looking at the double cherry :
A great height of white stillness.
Underneath a sky
the colour of milky grey jade.
Suddenly a crow flew between me and the tree —
Swooping, falling, in a shadow-black curve —
And blotted himself out in the blurred branches
of a leafless ash.
There he stayed for some time,
and I could only distinguish him by his
slight moving.
Then a wind caught the upper branches of the cherry,
And the long, white stems nodded up and down,
casually, to me in the window.
Nodded — but overhead the grey jade clouds
I take my portion of nothing
more than coffee
with the severest crow
I hear him giving ill language
to some other owl
drowsy and vexed
the river is too much
to be governed by art or order
it riots
sits
seems easy
unsettled as a crow
in plague time
found ourselves in eggs
silent together
we were simple
not knowing the way
found ourselves to go backward and forward
wild as the sea
it seemed like fire
upon every stroke
the crow made us
whole
hours without a witness
how the state and Customs
assess the foreign
how divide and excise
part by part
like the prerogative of the crow
to take any sandwich
with a cheap cry and fright
they kill a story
like a dissembling fanatic
laugh to hear pound
the greatest heart
street pretty
as a painted crow
that life all I need to look at
but her old body
dressed as if
she had been a road
thin answer
to the poor
in their claims against God
I put on my ugly face
to the multitude
my last act
conveniently mad
like the violence of a crow
come to poke at the people
standing in their fixed
and different pastures
morning brought new
velvet life to the crow
his wanting lung round and angry
bled raw salt
many were the knives strange was the ink
taken to the strangers’ table
that earth where
he would not sit
but in discontent went up
and down and up
the only trumpet
for a company of ants
meeting with great quiet
as if in an urn
hearing a crow
took us to the light
wise were we that had
no itch to pray
Carpenter, make me
a door into my life.
I am a crow, a plain old woman.
I bring none but myself to dinner
by the light of the moon.
Give me a further gallery
in my good ear.
I make a window into my cellar.
My cellar is full, a land where I have
a French cook and a horse—
black, but a perfect courtier.
My daughter would rather marry a crow.