2 September 2010 | Vol. 10, No. 3

Ravens at Tamalpais

by GREGORY DONOVAN

Bald white trunk & dead black bark, toc-toc. Small shrugs

in long black coats, their stripped pine whipping at the skyline…

swiftly unveiled, in twos and threes, ravens and the ideas

of ravens drip down onto the air, black silk scarves

pulling each other through the silk blue sleeves

in a wintry sky & out into the mind's eye to stall and dip,

nip at tail feathers, roll and dive, flip, spin, fold up

and fall, one thing after another in that sleight of hand

to alight again, pinned to their pine towering above the bay

and the smashed hat of Alcatraz. Turn my cold face to your sun.

Alarm calls, chase calls, flight calls, wing whistles,

bill snaps—and among their clacking & clicks

comes a mimicry of our ceaseless human speech, talk talk

they have captured on the wind, on the wing,

and as the far white city sinks back into its fog

they speak for us in lost languages, confused tongues.

The 'alala of Hawai'i, extinct in the wild, live only

in cages now, and the Pied Raven of the Faroe Islands

parade as museum stiffs, yet here, these ancients blown down

& off course & away from ancestors in ice age Asia

swirling in a blizzard rage two million years gone, these strong

settled Tamalpais long before the word arrived.

In Sweden they were glass-bottomed boats, airy ghosts

of the newly murdered dead, while in Denmark they fed

on the hearts of kings and still could read thoughts of men

before men themselves could think them.

Within the eye of slaughter, the raven's eloquence.

And who will love me when I'm gone?

Ravens will call coyotes and wolves to the work,

to tear open the carcass for shaggy birds to feed upon.

A raven forgets nothing and is a most skillful thief

who brings away the shining and the bright,

black-eyed poets stealing each other's buried cache and

flying farther and faster to hide what was stolen.

A raven showed Adam how to scrape the dirt for Abel,

and yet I have slept as ravens slid down steep banks of snow

to take off again into the dizzying loops of their delight.

I have slept as the sacred spies of Odin, his eyes and ears, his ill

memory and blunt mind, flitted down to swallow anything at all.

Bird of Prophecy, Bringer of Fire, Protector of the Tower,

Groom of the Daughter of the Fog whose soft touch

on ocean's hair will lure salmon to leap into the boat:

if I step up now to that highest trail's edge and slip

off and flap my puny nightmare wings and cry out

in the long fall, then you will hold me in the last dark

of your glance, fly to me, cure me, take out my eyes. Toc-toc.

Your mother swallowed the white stone, smooth as an egg.

Toc-toc. Your cry is the knock at my coffin door.