Pen clenched in left hand,
bent over her sudoku…
our train cools down.
To grandmother and
grandfather, his tattoo, but
I don’t ask him why.
Two umbrellas hung
from the guard tower railing,
not needed today.
Balloon flowers,
available in two shades;
grade-school commuters.
Ducks greet the sunrise
I hear them but don’t see them
as they plan their day.
I put down my book
In this heat, I sweat profuse.
I splash water at my armpits
The nape of my neck
And shameless, over my genitals.
On the bed, in the nude
I fart and sigh, happy.
The dogs lie legs up in the air,
Too tired to smell the wind.
I choke at the chilled lemonade
Gurgling down my throat.
Out in the portico, a crow
Dips its beak and then jumps
Into the clay pan, splashing in the water.
I wish I were a fish,
Swishing my tail, chilling
With the mermaids.
A taste is emphasized in the past, and cannibals are emphasized in the future. We begin to segment our social explorations, like construction workers with boots that cramp their ankles. All visible defenses keep bumming off the invisible offense of Reality itself, while commerce grows dynamic near a spillway. Two-thirds of any action is composed of a prior action, like those cotton plugs in the necks of aspirin bottles. Levitation is the Central Rose.
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
one, two, three crows
walk a branch
When first we came
to the Country Fair,
strange players wove
their spell round us
in lazing noon:
no one thought
the day should ever
end. Had we all
turned into crows,
would we have been
surprised?
A flock of a hundred or more crows
In echelons of three or four
Were flying obvious search-patterns
Over a square mile of wet, recently ploughed
Country in Perth County, Ontario;
In spring so cold you might still call it winter.
There was no missing the fact of
Their intent to find what was to be found
For their provision. Without lamenting
The shortage of life's commodities,
They looked for food with such sure diligence
That discovery was a certainty;
For which they would pay neither taxes or rent.
It is the most boring number—
a thin, sour preacher flagging
in the second hour of an August sermon,
an enraged father pounding on an anvil.
It is priapic but sterile, one tree
remaining after clear-cut.
“One” wakes up drunk, snarls
at the television. “One” demands
compliance and calls it consensus.
“One” complies. “One” is the arrow
that killed the crow.
The woman who has grown old
And knows desire must die,
Yet turns to love again,
Hears the crows' cry.
She is a stem long hardened,
A weed that no scythe mows.
The heart's laughter will be to her
The crying of the crows.
Who slide in the air with the same voice
Over what yields not, and what yields,
Alike in spring, and when there is only bitter
Winter-burning in the fields.
So this is the reed?
The very pipes for singing--
Life plays me new songs.
Wistfully from out the dawn
The crows broke across the sky!
Jonas Keene thought his lot a hard one
Because his children were all failures.
But I know of a fate more trying than that:
It is to be a failure while your children are successes.
For I raised a brood of eagles
Who flew away at last, leaving me
A crow on the abandoned bough.
Then, with the ambition to prefix
Honorable to my name,
And thus to win my children’s admiration,
I ran for County Superintendent of Schools,
Spending my accumulations to win—and lost.
That fall my daughter received first prize in Paris
For her picture, entitled, “The Old Mill”—
(It was of the water mill before Henry Wilkin put in steam.)
The feeling that I was not worthy of her finished me.
There is the caw of a crow,
And the hesitant song of a thrush.
There is the tinkle of a cowbell far away,
And the voice of a plowman on Shipley’s hill.
The forest beyond the orchard is still
With midsummer stillness;
And along the road a wagon chuckles,
Loaded with corn, going to Atterbury.
And an old man sits under a tree asleep,
And an old woman crosses the road,
Coming from the orchard with a bucket of blackberries.
And a boy lies in the grass
Near the feet of the old man,
And looks up at the sailing clouds,
And longs, and longs, and longs
For what, he knows not: