He’s Good For

He’s good for backrubs
and fastening a necklace,
she said, and paused
just long enough.
As for the other . . .

He hung down his mulish head,
felt shame’s slow burn
at the truth—her truth—
spilled like wine on the tablecloth,

her breath flickering the candlelight,
her guests caught holding
their silver aloft.
I’m teasing, she said. Ha.
Showing her neat white teeth.

**

The Last Bright Day of Autumn

Lit by the late
afternoon sun,
all that was brown
was gold, for a moment—
dead meadow grass,
field of grazing Jerseys,
bare branches against blue sky.

We’re running out of time.
Everything you said
on that country drive
was a summing up
or a letting go.
Your hand impatient
on the stick shift
as dusk drifted down,
your profile dissolving
into the gray light.
The fading began then.

This is buzzard country,
but never had I seen so many—
100 easy, gliding on the updraft,
weaving their dark dance;
others roosted in a high tree,
hunched, expectant.
We watched from the roadside
as by ones and twos
they spiraled down,
half-plunging, half-falling,
onto what we could not see,
but what I imagined
had once been magnificent
to have drawn so many
ravenous scavengers.
They must have been circling
a long time, you said,
before we ever noticed.

**

Knitting

His was not
a family of storytellers,
but of quiet brooders
whose needles clicked
and flashed in the firelight.
When roused to talk,
his grandmother and her sisters
sounded like starlings
or rusty gates.
He never knew when
a phrase would escape,
nor what weight to give it:
that was a blackberry winter,
give him a lick and a promise,
beauty is as beauty does.
He tossed balls of yarn
as their words floated up
like clouds, thickening
the air with possibility.

**

Crow Diving

I want whatever glistens
there, thinks Crow
in the black locust tree.
She shifts her weight and lifts
one foot, then the other,
rustles her sooty wings.
The trash pit’s full of shiny bits—
tinfoil, pop-tops, smashed glass, earring.

**
Goddess of the corpse,
prophetess, creature
who serves or defies
the god of wind, carries
the messages of witches,
changes shape from bird to human,
out-tricks even Fox.
Night is her cloak.
She’ll join in the murder of an interloper,
hang around the battlefield,
graveyard, roadside,
chat you up in your own back yard.

**
Down and down,
to snatch each piece
and fly back to her cache
hidden in dock weed
and skunk cabbage.
She unearths her old treasures,
drops in the new,
and spreads out the loot.
She plays with a trinket—
mica, tinsel?—and struts,
slick with greed: mine, all mine.

**
one crow sorrow
two crows joy
three for a girl
four for a boy
five for rich
six for poor
seven for a witch
I can tell you no more

**
All this sheen and sparkle,
skirting and swooping,
swagger and swank
have made her ravenous.
She covers her goods
with leaves and dirt and lifts
herself to scout for nestlings
or something dead along a ditch.
She’ll tear off bloody scraps,
throat pouch bulging,
then flap back to her roost.
There’s her mate. She clicks
her open beak against his,
bitches and laughs about her day,
takes his foot in her own.
Then signals to a cocky neighbor,
hop on, let’s give it a go.