He is stopped at the end of the off ramp
as the cars stream by in both directions. Waiting.
He lifts his eyes to the field across the road,
a collage of scrub and yellow clay.
Then he sees the crows, sagging the limbs
of three dark and leafless trees.
There must be near a hundred, shimmering
like black candle flames. In that moment
before he hears the horn, he wonders
at their calculations. Three will light
as four depart, climbing slowly north
into a haze with clouds of rose and gold.
Driving on, he counts the measures
of such movements, until he comes upon
two crows picking at the carcass of a squirrel.
It happens as it does because it does.
Those crooked trees that only crows would seek
become a constellation mapped across his soul.
He stops a while to ponder in the Cuyahoga Valley,
parking in the lot above the Quarry Lock, where
failing sunlight flashes through a stand of cedar.
Lights and shadows as ethereal as his grasp
of hopefulness. He steps out and haunts
the shadow lines to better see the airs.
In his mind the crows still light and leave.
He thinks, “How they roost in our propensities!”
They bring wisdom. They bring fear. They tell futures.
They chant the story of creation.
Or maybe they’re just busy being crows.
He’s heard it said that crows can dream.
He’s heard it said that crows have memories
that crowd their now with how to live.
He waits and he remembers. It is a season
to hear the rising tones of crows at dawn,
at gloaming, in their Book of Hours.
And there he sighs without a trace of gloom.
This poem first appeared in Hope as A Construction (Bollom Dog Press, 2023).
—
David Adams is a poet living in Burton, Ohio. He has been a laborer, academic and technical writer. Hope As a Construction, his 11th collection of poems, was published by Bottom Dog Press in 2023. His prose memoir, Casual Labor, was published by Blue Shale Books in 2021. David collaborated with the composer Dawn Sonntag to complete Clara: A Life and Death in Shadow, an opera in three acts about Clara Haber.
