A Brief: On the Side of the Highway 95

A Brief: On the Side of the Highway 95

farewell to an idea...The mother's face,

The purpose of the poem, fills the room.

They are together, here, and it is warm.

                                                        Wallace Stevens

                                                         The Auroras of Autumn, 1947

On the way, when arriving was

parenthetical and the time between
the departures and the arrivals, I saw
two crows alone on the highway

pecking at whatever anything they were free

to cull.  How like Naomi’s

Ruth to come when all the rest were through

and be content sifting this Boaz

gravel for what of winter or spring

had laid down there: stained remains of headlight

froze doe maybe or the shells of a seasonal

entomologist’s silica once it’s ground

to chaff.  And salt.  Always salt.  Maybe
they require, such authoritative

birds, nothing of me at all except my seeing

and I’m happy about that, to see them,

soaking up the road and all the rest that’s on them.

It's the way grain soaks water, how it pulls it

back into itself like a memory

and swells with only one goal: to negotiate

the dark it dried itself into while

saving the day or a lady or maybe

two crows who grope for it on the side

of this road, who may drop it, completely
cocooned in the avenue of stranger

places, between, maybe, if they’re going

that way, a live oak and the pine-

cone split half open, a beetle

on one of her hundred brown, pine-sap

glazed tongues, and not knowing it

but owing it all to these two crows and a drive by

on the way to arriving.