"The Twa Corbies"

1.

The boy next door has learned how to create piercing whistles with a blade of grass and tells me he can get the attention of crows and blue jays. He's just a kid in suburban Columbus, Ohio, a ten-year-old who plays too much Nintendo but now he's delirious because he's got the birds talking. He stands under a locust tree and blows. A loud crow struts a telephone wire and calls back.

I picture Yamaguchi Goro playing the shakuhachi flute in the woods of Nara. Music, even a child's primal music, pays homage to the soundscape. When I was a kid we lived on a dirt road in New Hampshire. The crows and blue jays walked across our roof and fought like mad. We were an anomalous family out there in the woods. We practiced a kind of ersatz Zen—risking silliness with the crows and talking back to everything that called.

2.

New Hampshire, 1959

The Victrola dates from the mid-twenties. It has long been surpassed by electricity and high fidelity and, yes, stereophonic sound, a sound that can be heard in the Armstrong's house—the family down the road.

I am in love with Bessie Smith's voice. It springs from the Victrola's gooseneck horn—a voice that can pound nails. God how I love this! And I love the sound as the fat needle pitches through the grooves of the record: this is a seashell's hiss or a noise like a radio tuned to nothing. I love it when the record comes to an end and the needle drunkenly bobs against the red paper label. And the ghost of Bessie's voice still circles around me. Then I notice the deep Sunday silence in the rest of the house!

I fish through stacks of acetate records. What an odd assortment! Dinah Shore's "Mother May I" and Amelita Galli-Curci singing in Carmen; Furtwangler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic; "The Great Caruso"; Bix Beiderbeck and Tommy Dorsey. Strangest of all was a group of records from the Soviet Union—martial music performed by the Red Army. The labels in Russian revealed nothing about their mysteries. One could hear the Stalinist fervor of a thousand men with arms linked, men marching across Kazakhstan.

I spent the better part of that summer moving between the alcove with its gramophone and the woods where I thought I might find the singing soldiers of the Red Army. Without much in the way of usable vision I listened to everything: a furnace long abandoned contained crickets. I walked to the woods just to hear them sing inside their iron house.

3.

Every summer I return to New Hampshire. I climb a steep hill on the north side of Rattlesnake Island. I'm lucky to own a cabin "out" on the lake. Lake Winnipesaukee is the largest lake in New Hampshire, and from its shores you can see the White Mountains and the Osipee range. Even though I'm blind I often come alone to the island with only my yellow Labrador for company. I listen to lightning storms and fierce waves. Sometimes I wake before sunrise and the lake is still. This morning two crows are talking. Where have I heard them before? Mozart's Die Enfuhrung aus dem Serail—Konstanze and Blonde—Edita Gruberova, and Gosta Winbergh laughing, contralto, atrocious and beautiful. I realize that my first job of the new summer is to listen to the crows all day.

There's a Korean saying that the crow has 12 notes, none of them music. Not so! These crows down by the lakeshore are D flat and F. I take a tuning fork and place it against a double-pane glass window. These operatic crows are making notes. They are each performing a recitative, gloating over the entrails of a gull . . . talking about the hint of rain in their respective trees . . . Or maybe like Walt Whitman...