II
BIRD, SMOKE, CRYSTAL, BONE
I.
The last December sunlight falls on these crows,
some four and twenty blackbirds scrabbling on snow,
their muddied beaks devouring crusts Iâd left
for robins. Seen this close, through plate glass doors,
theyâre huge, as big as cats. The light wonât shine,
reddened, from their black eyes. They bob their heads
obscenely till the chunks of bread go down.
Is there some augury in scavengers
who swerve from their nightly flight across the river
to roost in a Cincinnati graveyard, just
to steal the food of songbirds? Groups of crows
are called murders; rooks, a parliament.
Their cuneiform tracks reveal to the snow
its own defilement, rain that fell so soft
on gravestones, a drowning sailorâs would-be breath,
the other incarnations of waters past.
Will I be able to read them? Ice has glazed
the snow beyond soft powder to gleaming chunks
that crunch and shatter under my boots. The crows
have left behind a feather, its rachis hotâ
what bloody story would it tell for me?
Perhaps the truth for bread; perhaps a lie,
being crows. The bread wasnât mine, this house
not mine. The crows know they owe me nothing.
II.
This book Iâve pulled from a strangerâs shelf,
an old, no doubt expensive leather-bound
on witchcraft, fails to mention New Yearâs Eve,
which seems an oversight. Itâs understoodâ
if only in the dour modern senseâ
that this night is something magical.
Anticipation charges the air, the news,
and even the owners of this house have flown
to someplace elsewhere, better, to celebrate
in style. Their dog and I have gone through our
routinesâjust one more icy walk before
we call it a night. And in the meantime, this:
a few portentous hours to fill, to kill,
with pages falling open on their own,
the weight of print and plates and fissured spine
selecting for me passages to read,
a scattered history in bones and ash.
III.
The Romans favored augury, the tales
interpreted from flights of noble birds,
and gently unwound the shrouded blueprints of fate
from bulging entrails of sacrificed bulls.
They called this art haruspicyâeach art,
however dark, must have an honest name.
The Druids read the death throes of victims bled
on sacred stones, and then, like Romans, turned
to viscera. Somewhere in those heavy coils,
the Druid and Roman priests divined each other,
the sacred groves destroyed, and Rome supremeâ
and yet the Druids fought, their women and men
in holy black and blood-stained robes dead
and dying, their final prophecies fulfilled.
IV.
Such things are never easy. The smoke that curls
from sacred fires doesnât write itself
in English, wonât spell out a word or name.
We look instead for faces, ashy ghosts
of war or love or fortune. Read them quickly,
before the wind can tear their shapes apart.
V.
Begin with artifacts, protected now
by inch-thick glass and velvet, under guard
at the British Museum. The book describes a slab
of rock, obsidian, and a crystal egg.
From this, take history: Hernån Cortés
at sail from savage Veracruz at last,
the mirror rock among his cargo of gold,
another trinket passed around at court
and later sent to woo the English bitch,
Elizabeth. Through her it came to Dee,
the court astrologer, an earnest man
who recognized his limits. He used
his Aztec magic glass for scrying, gazed
within its polished world until he fo...