About Crows

About Crows

3 A b o u t Crows What kind of shape would hold this, even briefly, all together, with no magical bird, and without its song? Law r en ce Ra a b (i) There is always a lone crow high in a tree above a Little League game, and sometimes one boy, breathing in the oil rubbed into the leather webbing of his glove, notices it—as he stands alone in left field—and says nothing about the blue-black darkness on its wing, or this feeling, for the first time, growing inside of him. He follows the abandoned park road in the direction of home and searches the limbs breaking the overcast sky into a puzzle board. For how else could childhood end, if not in slow and private discovery of this puzzle that will never come together again? (ii) Somewhere in this poem, already, I want to use the phrase “a murder of crows,” though I know it’s too “poetic” and could only conjure the ghost of Poe to appear at the margin of this page like a man with his hands wrapped in bandages among the trees at the edge of a frozen field. None of the parents seem to mind so long as their children stay in sight; one now is rounding third—c’mon, get the lead out!—as another falls through the empty space between monkey bars and dirty beach sand. She brushes away the grains imbedded in her red knees and then looks up toward the commotion of the foul lines while, from behind, one hand tightens over her lips as another lifts her tiny body up by the abdomen. (iii) When a young crow falls from its roosting perch, both parents fly down and spend the night on the ground with it. Concern impels them to do this, as it’s difficult to believe they could achieve anything except endangering their own lives should a fox or another animal discover them in the night. 4 Carrion crows often come close to man and enable themselves to be shot if their young cry out in fear, but sometimes the parents simply cannot hear the plea or the rustling through the dry leaves below, as dark turns toward a dawn that still-frames the nature scene, and makes it all seem inevitable. (iv) In Japan, if a crow flies in a circle three times over your house, there will be a death in the family. In Japan, the Buddha lives in the larynx; all sound passing through it should be true. After you die, your family will sleep in a circle around your casket, and—once the organs and flesh have burned away from your bones—your loved ones will surround you again to pick the little visible that remains off the oven tray and place it in an urn (your body’s new shape taking that of the ceremonial vase) with his Holiness picked up, delicately with chopsticks, last, and set atop the pile of fragment and ash. After the bones of the throat have been silent for thirty-nine days, your spirit will be free to leave and enter another body. (v) My sister crouches over her coffee table, packing marijuana into a pipe bowl as a murder of crows reflect off the TV donated by a Christian charity. My sister has surrendered to her doubt in everything. She won’t see doctors anymore. Uncertain about everything prior to the event: the heart-shaped chocolate box saved as a keepsake from our father has become—perhaps— a duplicate of the original, bought to replace what she threw away seventeen years ago. When I tell her I’ve started to write a book “about crows,” she says she’s not certain if there ever was a bar across the street from her nursery school or whether watermelons were sold from a truck there for only a dollar. Though she’s been questioned countless times, she’s still unsure what happened before her mouth learned to stop screaming and worked only to lick condensation from the brick walls of a padlocked root cellar. (vi) A raven is simply a famous crow. And though he may have been the most famous poet of his time, the last five days of Edgar Allan Poe’s life are a mystery. 5 Theories abound, but many believe that after stepping briefly off a boat bound for Philadelphia from Baltimore, he stopped into a bar for a...