Cat, Two Crows

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.