Tuesday Poem: originally published by The Wild in 2009

 

A Crow and Two Beer Bottles

are all you see as you skim

the arc of the highway entrance ramp.

Bottles crusty with mud

and embedded in pools of roadside grit.

Bird pecking in slow motion

at some dead mysterious stuff

in the grass on the verge.

Picture the empties flying

like headless corpses out of a pick-up.

Picture wall-to-wall crows

and acres of bones stripped clean.

Soldiers pouring beer down

their throats in between shifts

so they won’t wake up

when they scream in the night.

Crows caught mid-flight

by a swarm of bullets,

because we can’t accept

their roosting among us as kinship.

Beer bottles layering calluses over the heart.

Birds stripping flesh in long

streamers that look like ticker tape.

Bodies, crusty with mud, wearing

crows where their eyes used to be

Crows like big fat masks

you put on for Mardi Gras.

Chip your tooth on a

bottle if you’re not careful.

Play your little ivories like dice;

get the crows to curl round as little dots

And you’ve got yourself a craps game.

This is what it’s come down to:

your cat obsessed every night,

with attacking the little

half moon of streetlight,

that shines through the window

onto the opposite wall,

and you, in your post-election funk,

feeling apocalyptic enough

to leap at a pair of images

over and over until

your mind goes numb.