For a moment, Crow becomes a creature of light
And snow melts, and in its place
flowers
And silence unfurls like a squirrel
racing across a branch
And hours scatter
like a spilled alphabet
The morning reflected on a doe’s
wet nose
His house is clean, no need
to take out the trash
But the trees, the trees carry
the same old burden
He dares not look at them for fear
of sparking the beetle kill pine
Why is there always something, he thinks,
to stir his stomach
like a rat with a file
He searches the thread of tulips
and trillium lining the meadow
Looking for anything to hold
his roiling body
He lands among them, expecting
something—a vision, an old bottlecap
It begins snowing again, wind
blowing like an obscene mouth
A bough breaks overhead
making a kind of steeple
Crow realizes the body is sixty percent water
The skin beneath his face changes shape
from moment to moment
like the mud of the swamp
And the mountain is a womb filled with hours
And the sun falls from the sky
remembered only by the sea slug
in a god’s golden horn
Of his prior existence
he has only a phantom knowledge
like so many secrets hidden
A trick of moonlight on dark water
All morning the people watch him
from the edge of the forest
They shake their feathered fists
Everything starts as free, he says
So I am, all at once, he says
A feeling flashes through him
like a sudden impulse to speak
or to hit someone
Blue heron on the bank
neck strained ready to pluck
a fish
Careful
the drowning is at hand
To my son after a conversation about seeing his first Grizzly in Alaska
There’s no need to imagine the size
Of the footprint you stepped in
Or the lumbering body stumbling
Through the fever of a dream until
It rose up seeking some lost world,
Or a better look at the man before it,
The warm weight of its breathing
Like the violence of summer rain.
No need to imagine the unearthly
Silence or the clock’s loneliness.
You could have acted on instinct,
Run away or crawled to your tent
For bear spray, grabbed a weapon
With which to fight. But you are used
To the black dog that growls each morning
In the threshing hours, and so you stand,
Some slippery force, animal born,
Growing inside, coming quietly
And darkly, from a great depth because
This is no wilderness you can rip into.
And beyond the meadow, the cattails
Slice open the yellow belly of moon,
While the wet pine needles shake off
The widowed light, that tugging fear
That each day reveals to us the small
And uneasy gods we are, and the wind
Makes no sound, and you breathe in
The ammoniac reek of its thick
And bristled fur, and the red-orange
Sun erupts over the horizon
As your thoughts sink and rise, sink and rise,
And the great bear does not turn away,
But neither do you.
To my son after a conversation about the homeless person he met at the shelter
The privilege of having
to imagine
is no longer
here
It’s good to volunteer
but carry a needle
and thread
to spin a skin
around you
as winters are wedded
to long
and you are more
than what
you become
in their mouths
And there is a violence
at the heart
of the Oracle
that reads
who we must be
And you are right
no one is
disposable
and everyone
wants
something
in the end
And you’re tired
and your hands
are cold
And one day
dreamers wake
and they are
old
So please don’t
seek the quiet
death
Join the others
now
body that won’t
rest
Go back
to the un-
concealed
Bend stiff
with awe
before
the last
dandelions
in the field
At the wood’s edge
The crows congregate like highschoolers
gossiping at the bus stop
They’re talking about you—You’re so kind,
so passionate, so good
You need nothing
They don’t understand, you can lie
with your face, your body
Now the rain comes, steady and heavy,
and the crows scatter
The sky thick through the pines
The trees are full of eyes—
a large stillness watching you
You have often been afraid, motionless
at the edge of your empty life
Now, like the fairy tales, you walk
alone in the forest
Far off, the hammering of the woodpecker
splits the silence
(How can we know how long such moments
will last?)
The slant light of certainty falls
on your sun-dark shoulders
And you are on your knees again
The crows return to peck hungrily
at the ground about you
Peter Grandbois is the author of fifteen books, the most recent of which is the novel/novella pairing, Cat People and Dream Memories of the Fifty Foot Woman. He is poetry editor at Boulevard and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com.