Cat,
Two Crows
On high, the love
that drew the bath and scattered it with salts
Still radiates new projects old as day…
James Merrill
Downward Look
It’s because it’s what I might say if
I were one of the two in the sky,
one of the couple of crows three or four
wing beats behind. Even the lead
is slow, though it’s the poke who’s
calling, soft enough, a trill
or a purr. Maybe it’s I’ll meet you
there save me one of the whatever
it is we’ve set out for: a bare
oak branch, a cross’s arm at the church.
They’ll scan, they always do, birds,
ahead and below and tip their rudder
tail and dip and the wind will be dismissed
the way I dismiss the ones who claim
to know it but have never felt it. Like
sorrow over the way the school kids
walk by the body of a still warm cat, her
black length spread long on the side-
walk. Car-struck probably, and even though
I’ve only got a quarter mile to go from
there to here, by the time my business
is done and I drive back by someone’s
taken in the poor thing and maybe
will cry all day and later and tomorrow
too when they see the crows because
they’re the same color. When the owner
looks up at the coming cloud, maybe
they’ll stop and gawk and for an instant
all will become weightless as flight
and how come they never saw, when night
stalked on the shelf and the mice
trembled in a pocket of darker than dark
how the crows were no more crows
and maybe it wasn’t seeing them but
hearing—listen: I’m out raking the winter’s
sand away and between one pull
and the next they swish by and it’s
at first a tail in the grass and then its wind
lifting the paper salvation the Jehovah’s
Witness left (it’s in the gravel now, all winter
buried under the snow, they’d left it
when I wasn’t home) and the sound
of God on the crinkled dry wet now dry
again pages are the same as the kids walking
by dragging their feet, slipping and skidding
in what I’m trying to sweep away
and the pattern it all makes curls around
the stationary stones, lines and swirls
like a Zen monk rakes, like two birds flying
and one behind the other and coming up
to some obstacle and breaking
away to meet again soon or late
when the brick ends and the purr is just to be
sure they’re heard, because let me tell you
winter’s not through with us yet
though we can't know that for sure,
not ever. No, not ever.
though we can't know that for sure,
not ever. No, not ever.
