Saturday, February 17
RAVENS FLYING
I climb the hill to watch the glassy walls
of San Francisco glow, to hear the distant
moan of ships. To see the fog, the floating
fog that pushes clearly through the eye.
A pair of ravens turning slowly in the frame.
I think of hiking up the Bitter Root in rain.
The day you called me from the waiting room
to tell me it was done. The night we kissed
at the train station depot in St. Paul, pressing
a cigarette into your skin. The love I felt
then, wave-like, breaking a hole in my chest
like a shotgun fired through drywall. The same
red impressionistic tones I tell my students
not to use. The scar on your hand and
the effort it takes to write even one honest
word. The light goes out, the light goes in.
The ravens hold the sky. And no matter what
they say about changing your life, getting over
it quickly, becoming stone, becoming the long
branch with new blossoms turning, loving
leaves a darkness on the mind. We are not
meant to go back in time, to return to the wound
forever. We are meant to climb the hill alone,
to love what it was with a faith in wind
and a failed attempt to describe it. We start
where we are, and when the feeling fades we turn
the poem, not toward the birds, the image
of black wings, but toward the unpredictable
way they dive, in unison, toward the ground.
(Kai Carlson-Wee)