Maybe it's a little early in fall for this poem. I don't find myself in this mood much until after Dia De Los Muertos. The days are still warm, no need for heat at night. But at least last night we had a heavy fog.
This piece has never been on Metaphor before, and if the time isn't right maybe the poem will hasten it on.
Darkening
Now in the dying of the year
in the season of crows
the blue of everything in my life
deepens, turns to the steel
of an old knife.I throw a shadow, blue as a bruise,
which rises and gathers against the ceiling.
On my stove the flames of gas
are almost black.I start to write to you
but the paper darkens
until my blue words disappear.The moon which shaved its silver
on my bed in spring
hangs as an indiscernible grape.Venus weeps over the shoulder
of the moon, to see me
writing poems in blood.
Crows appear in my writing pretty often; among the non-humans around me, they're second only to dogs. It's funny because we don't have a lot of crows here. Just small flocks and individuals cawing from pine and eucalyptus trees. When they stand and caw alone, they have a certain restlessness; they seem to be saying that something is wrong.
I spent a lot of autumn days in the San Joaquin Valley, when I was younger. I remember great flocks, legions of crows.
Here's another poem in which I pondered these birds.
Click the image of Van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Crows to enlarge it. To see it even bigger, click here.
To view/download the PDF version of Darkening, click here.
Darkening by J. Kyle Kimberlin
is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
3.0 United States License.