Crows

John James Audubon, "American Crow,"
1861, Brooklyn Museum

So I’ve come to the place where I’ll die. If
I’m lucky, this death’s as far off as the time
it will take to walk these mountains up and
down and then up again, feeling soft rains
revive me; long after I’m part of this land,
its hills, the way mycelium feathering the
underside of leaf-duff’s a part of this place,
the way the black basalt is, and those root-
hairs on all the trees whose names do still
escape me. I know this place: it’s where my
endings and beginnings live, where the story
of stories, Scheherazade’s tale, is carried off
by the black crows for whom I lay bread out
every morning, glad as we are to be so alive.