Crow Names, and: Dream Song, and: After Four Days of Rain the Sky Forgets

Abstract

Crow Names, and: Dream Song, and: After Four Days of Rain the Sky Forgets Doug Ramspeck (bio) Crow Names After we tired of words there was dark and darker. A fine warm rain fell. You could hear them beyond the gabled roofs, beyond the open fields in the swales. Dusk became ash. No one tended to the cries and they grew louder, claiming the back roads past the railroad tracks, the bar ditches, rising from pokeweed, leatherleaf. Pressing through screen mesh, clinging to our clothes, following us down hallways. We gave names to this: disfigured creature, black moon, shape of mind. The sounds were stone and flesh, wound and feathers. Circling the yards then circling [End Page 87] back. Carrying the stink of wet compost, loam rain. Calling and calling to our scavenged bodies. Dream Song At dawn these birds are blackish and tangential, and the lightcomes in low from the field, unfathomable. There is a song the grass sings by holding still,that my wife sings by leaning against the windowsill, her arms crossed and occasional:here is the day that hasn't yet begun, that holds itself for this moment in abeyance. My neighbordescribes how when her child was born not alive she held him the way a pond bed holds its stagnantwaters, how everything becomes a form of statuary: to close your eyes and to feel the lengthof a held breath, that sense [End Page 88] that our lives are the space between our heartbeats,the instant before the eye blinks. Last year I bought a possum skull on eBay for a cover photofor a book, and I thought that I would connect it to rope to hang like a wind chime from a tree—life notimitating art but representing whatever our representations represent. The mother tells meshe dreams sometimes that her child begins squirming in her arms, that the doctorsbegin hovering around her, amazed, stunned by their mistake, and there is a momentinside that dream when they are too perplexed to rend the child from her arms to tend to him,when she herself has not yet come awake, an instant when the boy begins to open his mouthto cry his way into the world. [End Page 89] After Four Days of Rain the Sky Forgets The crows of childhood have arrived above the river,landing in the field to dig up new shoots of corn, perching as dark fire in the paper birches. As boyswe heard them calling out of their bodies, saw their fallen feathers black as prophecy in the grass,imagined their orange eyes watching my brother rubbing salt into my ankles, the leeches that clungthere foaming blood then letting go. We are useless in this: the birds slip in and out of years the way raindrips without memory from the leaves. We slept beneath stars, drifted in our father's rowboat in muddywaters, floated on our backs and let the current carry us. The crows rowed above my father wipinghis face with a handkerchief in the field, rowed above my mother and aunt attaching a rope to a possumskull so that it became a soundless wind chime dangling from a hickory, rowed past the school busappearing at the fork in the road by the First Baptist Church of Grace, rowed above the ambulance turningone summer evening into the gravel drive, rowed past the train tracks where the lovers parked their carsand looked through windshields at a moon listing placid and inhuman in a sky. The heartbeat of a crowdrums and thrashes in flight, and the birds perch as grief [End Page 90] on the shoulders of evening, huddled through thesefour days of rain moving across the body of the earth. When I shut my eyes, the crows remember meswimming underwater by the cattails, talking to the old woman who rented the apartment aboveour garage, a woman who dressed herself in wool, even in summer, and ventured down the stairs onlyfor funerals. I believe the crows have returned now to their own bodies, that the sky bleeds into them...