Four Crows

Four crows yell from the back lawn every morning, a quartet in black with something to say.

But I don’t know what it is.

This keeps happening, crows and otherwise.

I watch them out of the window next to the record shelf with the string quartets that also make a sound that’s urgent, out of the box, not always a caw, not always expected.

Mozart locked up secrets in his music that even he didn’t understand. We can listen all day, and not know, but that seems to make it all the more vital to lend an ear.

The lead violin crow leans into his part, stretching forward like a cow mooing.

Did you know that cows move when they moo, exactly as they sound? Blues guitarists aren’t the only ones who put their whole being into the note.

The other crows answer, scatter when I open the door, and eye me suspiciously from the stricken oak.

The flight crew of bumblebees worked the bank of lavender flowers the other day outside of the razor straight bricks of the nursing & rehab center.

A line of green and purple draping the hot air with that perfume. The spiderweb caught me, held me, and I stopped to look. Then I broke free of the invisible threads, brash as a fly buzzing back to “real life.”

Inside, old and not so old people propped up in wheelchairs, like the broken wooden trim of the clock I carefully balanced as the repair glue dried. Steady now.

“Have you seen the lavender outside?”

They hadn’t.

I haven’t been to the islands, either.

Both things take lots of effort, proportionally.

But I was heading that way anyway, so I went and stole a bunch of purple blooms from the bees, passed ‘em around, and said “smell this!”

“You know you can put ‘em in a dresser so your clothes get the scent” said one lady, suddenly a lady, and not the third person to wheel on the elevator before the door snags on the foot rest of the wheelchair.

(Pick your feet up, Ms. Martha.)

Soon I’ll kick the gas pedal and roll the window down to let in mountain air and climb, climb, climb.

I wonder if the meadows are blooming yet.

There are all these things that call to me, and I listen, but don’t know yet.

The blue distance will gaze back, and caw like the crow quartet on my front lawn

(In it’s own sort of way)

I’ll stand there, and wonder what it’s trying to tell me, thinking of the quantum mechanics hypothesizing about new dimensions curled up, tiny and in plain sight, unlockable.

Later, I’ll show people the sun through a special telescope, where we’ll marvel at the towering loops of plasma.

It’ll set, and we’ll walk across the moon (with our eyes at least)

Explain it with a million facts and figures, but…

Late at night, when we’re all tucked in under a midsummer’s sky

We might hear a caw

And still not know.

Then we’ll roll over, returning to the sensible world of dreams.