Some only know them by their crew
cut feathering, plumage
kept to
a martial taper. Or how clinically
they chart the human
ruckus, those prodigies
of decomposition. But so unlike
the buzzard, though, who gorges
mongrel on any old haunch
of carrion—a plebe for rot—the crow
dines with propriety, pecks
the forage off its bill
on a littered tampon. The talon always
so fussily kempt
afterward in a bird
bath—the owl, that well
studied miserabilist, watching on
judicially. My father once guaranteed to me
that a crow knows
the GDP of the neighborhood
it circles. They certainly don’t
patrol the holler, he said.
Now your mother’s neck
of the woods, northern Ohio of the industrial
strength carcinogen, funereal quiche, & gore
capitalist, that’s a crow
kind of outfit. We’ve only got buzzards
& no-gumption vultures. Don’t even mention
a raven. Anymore, they’re only in stuffy
old Europe & stories
written by candlelight. They beg
the monocled. A Dukedom comes
with its very own gross
of ravens nowadays. Like a sinecure,
I say, & toe over the turpentine. Well shit.
We are housepainting in a subdivision
three hours from home. Above us, crows
read the newspaper
with their noses—getting up to speed
on breakfast: something shot
less than sportingly in the yard
next us. I watch my father
watch their skyful of dark
reveille & imagine he must think O
to be propertied, solvent, to be enough
of a bonafide that a crow might drink
the pupil rheum from a thing I have
enough dominion over to decide when
it should die. & to be spared even
their prim digestion. Again, unlike the lifetime
of buzzards he’s seen halfwittedly
chawing the easymeat
from roadside spoilage, then chucking
up the surplus founder. He wants
to unwitness the slack
gizzard plumping like a colostomy bag. Tea had,
the crows will browse the high literature
of limb & shingle & power
line—tar-papered dilettantes—until their dinner
cedes to the quick hospice
of a drainage culvert or spice
garden. & beneath them I’ll continue
avoiding my father’s
toilsome eye, the ultramarine
sore as a gash. But the white
paint on his wrist
is on mine too. We are
togethered. It’s tribal, this paint
unthinned by rustwater, iodine,
or elsewise. & in the fungal silence
of the truck, plugging home hours later, we are still
ligatured—my father, ornery in his hunger
to have, and me woebegone with this cold
savvy: being monied is like being in love
or heaven, you never get out
what you put into it.
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