<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Crows
Crows love midwinter mornings
as I do
staggering, black
and shiny--out of their asylum.
Mornings so cold the air is seized
in the impasse
of its bitterness, a white, violet mist
hovering in the absence.
They drop from the naked trees for what remains.
Suet that hangs in a cage,
tethered to a limb.
Too bright, like lacquered boxes.
Too bright the shine on them.
Not yet defined from darkness.
We hope for what we understand,
pain that comes and goes and comes like winter,
in welcomed revelations.
A cardinal blooming on some January thorn.
Doves weeping, eating seeds that rained through cracks.
Sparrows purchased for pennies in Jerusalem
and eaten by the poor. It's what we
learned by repetition, first having, then
not having. Seeing
and not seeing.
Not a force of darkness spinning on beyond our reach.
Jesus says to live like crows.
It's remembering the sermon
as one of them jabs its black beak in the suet.
Don't worry a minute of your life.
Don't gather stores for winter.
Don't plant or harvest.
But the other birds are worried. A blue jay swoops
under a nearby pine shrill with jealousy. And
a sparrow in a leafless redbud is occupied by a mute terror.
In another account by the French explorer, de Creve Coeur,
crows leave a man hanging in a cage with his eyes picked out,
staring out of nothing at the empty horizon.
I'm outside.
I'm shivering.
I begin to not understand the need I have
to gather details.
That rabbis, for example, forbid mentioning of crows in prayer.
Or Pliny thinking crows were absent-minded
and couldn't find their ways back home.
I can't stop shivering.
The search for paradise, for the pain that goes away,
was not a search but a wandering. Haphazard.
And the black roots
so deep in me. The bitterness.
It's staggering.
--Marlon Ohnesorge-Fick <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
he's quite good.
and he's my friend.
