CROWS
            Polly Brown
                c. 1999
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One morning a crow flew so close above my head,
for days I was imprinted with the black
crenated pattern of its spread wings.
I thought first of an Inuit painting
in which a raven and an eagle fight
for a fish, the interlocking rhythm
of their feathers as they tumble through the sky;

then the crazy Maine poet
who wrote about crows as dark
hieroglyphs of despair--or at least
the pestering, nagging qualities
of the world. But what about crows who stroll
happy and calm by the roadside?
My farm-boy father was famous for talking

to horses, chiefly; but his brother Malcolm I see
with a tame pet crow
riding on his shoulder, eye to bright eye.
In those not-yet-abandoned pastures
to which I was born, crows cawed
from the tops of white pines by the river,
and crows still call to me out of that deepest,

cradled time before my mind invented language
or even the idea of itself.
Every spring crows' voices speak
across distance, and then
fly closer, and speak again;
their scattered voices call and answer; they say
how wide the world can be.


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