The Cabinetmaker's Window: Poems

The Hillbilly Break-Dance and the Talking Crow

50 The Hillbilly Break-Dance and the Talking Crow So the school bus skids around the mountain and kills my friend’s dog almost instantly and Lester in the back seat sticks his face out the window to say “Don’t eat that dog, he’s dead meat” and laughs and that was long ago and Lester lives in the mountain ghetto where the rich have not yet ruined the land with their paper mansions and he is hillbilly wild as a teenager and learns to break-dance and locks and pops and turns and rocks like a robot on summer nights drunk under the Christmas lights of his back porch where we watch as Lester works through his routine and once he moon-walked right off the edge and dropped down hard into the honeysuckle and the blue rocks of the place and sprung back to his feet and said “I’m all right god dammit” and shinnied back up to move some more and so it is not hard to believe Lester banged out of his house last week bored on a Sunday afternoon in August and wandered in the woods of the mountain as if through some cathedral so dark with leaves and fiddlehead ferns that light only reaches the ground through a thousand little tunnels and suddenly at his feet hop-hop-hopping along comes a crow who says all right then, all right, how are you? and Lester stops. All right then, how are you? says the crow again and cocks its head and looks up with its beady eye at Lester who looks away. Trucks rumble down the mountain hard in the distance and an airplane starts to make a sharp curve a mile above but they don’t know anymore about the world for a minute, Lester and the crow talking a while, he says just shooting the breeze. He says that crow knew the names of his 51 father and his grandfather and “all kinds of personal shit” and it said Lester, look at you. You’ve grown middle-aged and fat but I like you anyways and flew back into the trees just to let him think about it. And six other people have talked to this crow and now it is legend and that is why I am sitting in the Mount Hebron cemetery with a picnic lunch and waiting while the story does its thing I guess flying from tree to tree chasing owls maybe looking for something shiny which is why I have lined up ten dimes and a safety pin on the stone wall. To attract some magic, to call down the blessing of an impossible thing. All right then. It is getting darker. Let the new life begin. This page intentionally left blank ...