IN THE PINE WOODS, CROW AND OWL Mary Oliver p. 1983* ======================================= Great bumble. Sleek slicer. How the crows dream of you, caught at last in their black beaks. Dream of you leaking your life away. Your wings crumbling like old bark. Feathers falling from your breast like leaves, and your eyes two bolts of lightning gone to sleep. Eight of them fly over the pinewoods looking down into the branches. they know you are there somewhere, fat and drowsy from your night of rabbits and rats. Once this month you caught a crow. Scraps of him flew far and wide, the news rang all day through the woods. The cold river of their hatred roils day and night: you are their dream, their waking, their quarry, their demon. You are the pine god who never speaks but holds the keys to everything while they fly morning after morning against the shut doors. You will have a slow life, and eat them, one by one. They know it. They hate you. Still when one of them spies you out, all stream straight toward violence and confrontation. As though it helped to see the living proof. The bone-crushing prince of the dark days, gloomy at the interruption of his rest. Hissing and snapping, grabbing about him, dreadful as death's drum; mournful, unalterable fact. ======== * from _American_Primitive_, 1983 ======== ========