PETER GRANDBOIS

Crow pawns his feathers for a hint of knowing

Then waits naked in the pre-dawn light
Watching for signs
Only the close breathing of the wind beside him      
And the distant jingling of the milkman’s bottles
And there it is, such a tiny, small thing
He almost doesn’t see it
A broken tool. A shoe, or a tattered shirt
With a shiny button
He leaps from his branch to get a better look
Flutters and sputters in the air
Before the sidewalk strikes him in the face
He wakes to see the thing—
Such a small thing—
A pile of his own feathers 

Crow spies a hole in the ground

And investigates, but finds only
ennui and, perhaps, the long country
of his loneliness stretched across a
grocery store parking lot, blue sky
humming above, wind howling like
a wounded dog below. Still, he puts
ear to hole and hears tree roots spidering,
insects clicking like tongues, cicadas
unknotting their wings the same way
he untangles his dreamed self from
the body he is now. He imagines
it looks like a kind of paradise,
perhaps the one he hallucinated
the night before when he had a
103 degree fever—the stillness
hanging over a just mown lawn,
the surprise of your own voice
like a tributary or an explosion
of wings, the smell of aster and day
lilies, invisible emanations from
that other city of the soul. He stays
like that, ear to hole, unable to leave,
afraid to step inside no matter
how hungry. He is foolish about
so much, not like you or I, who would
face a mutiny of stars to better
understand the crusted dribble, the
viper black pitch of who we really are

Peter Grandbois is the author of fourteen books, the most recent of which is Domestic Bestiary. His plays have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com.