Crows

From a single grain they have multiplied.

When you look inthe eyes of one

you have seen them all.

At the edges of highways

they pick at limp things.

They are anything byt refined.

Or they fly out over the corn

like pellets of black fire,

like overlords.

Crow is crow, you say?

Drive down any road,

take a train or an airplane

across the world, leave

your old life behind,

die and be born again-

wherever you arrive

they’ll be there first,

glossy and rowdy

and indistinguishable.

The deep muscle of the world.

Mary Oliver

What a hag is love

What a crone

With omens

and past lives

This mist must be her breath

inescapably seeping

into my days

her womb

laughing at

my cut destiny

at the rewrite of troy

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of gray unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a slient core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind: the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season:
These are the things that we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.

Adrienne Rich
We will miss your brillance!