Peter Grandbois

 
Crow puts stone to tongue

And listens to his smokedark spirit                           
A sound so lonely inside
He almost can’t find it,
But there it is, lying across a rock
On the shore of a mountain lake
Do you see it, flicking its tail, watching
Waiting for the spiders who are never lost
 

Crow stares at the disinterested sky

The sun sits fat over unspooling fields

The horizon a line of blue drawn
by a new ruler

Crow waves his wings, coughing, shouting
for some sort of ceremony
demanding it will be big

The rotten noon squeezes his soul
to the size of a cockroach

There is little left between us
save mutual contempt, he says,

and you wonder if he’s talking
about the sky or speaking one
animal to another, as if singing
yourselves miserably to sleep