—divination by birds
So you’re in the Van Gogh museum sneaking a pic
of Wheat Fields with Crows with a cell phone because
you’ve come up with a different crow count 3x now,
& because you can’t quite see where crows end
& night begins, because if you look hard enough
you’ll look into the rest of Vincent’s life
since the painting was his last, & you’ll need
something, later, to bring you back to this moment
where forty-five, or forty-eight, or fifty vanishing
points watch you begin to disappear back into
your life, where you’re questioning everything
you know about crows, & light, & last words,
but here’s a hand gripping your collar, & another
knuckled into your back, someone with coffee
& herring-breath muttering kloatsek, a Frisian insult,
meaning asshole, or douchebag, which means the guard
might be from Friesland, a Netherlands province
with a language no one officially recognizes as a language,
but such a little area that he might be a distant
relative, & because comedy will always trump tragedy
in your life, you stumble as you turn to flip the bird
at this longlost cousin, & fall back to the asphalt,
eyeball to shattered eyeball with a dead crow.
And look up at what it looked at last: just another
street, a four story redbrick skyline across the way,
a piano dangling in front of one of the windows.
A contrail-crossed sky. Salt air blowing in
from the ocean that separates you from everyone
you know. If art is just the thing that makes you
more vulnerable, couldn’t this crow, this bit
of char, this black tongue gone cold cursing,
be included? And what else has knocked you
on your ass lately? The man in Argentina who fitted
his father’s left hand to his own, a hand recovered
from a pile of smoldering bones. The splotch on the iris
of a 3-year-old in a picture, yellow sun, that someone
on social media identified as the beginning of Coats’ disease,
yellow shine of an unseen scar on the back of her retina,
& so saved her vision. Or the look in your wife’s eyes,
the glistening at the crow’s feet beside them,
when you finished the crib, twelve white slats on each side
of the golden-ratioed rectangle, one for every pair
of ribs, ribs right now the size of dragonfly wings,
& just as translucent. At the end of two lives,
at the beginning of another, you take your first steps
back into the world, with all the brushwork left
upon you, your body upside down in the canal
next to you, body among the evening stars, a point
of light for every feather burning in your memory.
from Poetry Northwest 11.2 Winter & Spring 2017More by Mark Wagenaar from the library
Copyright © Mark Wagenaar
Used with the permission of the author
on behalf of Poetry Northwest.