Crow’s Feet

 

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Crow’s Feet

So many meanings, so many possibilities. I remember them round my grandmother’s eyes, wrinkles, laughter lines, crow’s feet. And then there are the real crows, sauntering, swaggering, two roadside hops, and take off. So bold, that sometimes they will stand there and defy you and your car, refusing to fly, but always leaving their footprints, crows’ feet in the snow.

We have a family of seven. They own our garden. Visit us every day. Check us out. Nothing like the whistle of the wind in their pinions as they sweep low over our roof, summer and winter, all year round. We belong to them, not them to us.

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Crows: such shadows, hovering  in our minds, casting their shadows over our lives and our deaths, for ‘the coward dies a thousand deaths, the hero dies but one’ and down, deep down, we are all cowards, in one way or another, and the crows await each one of our thousand deaths.

Carnival

 

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Carnival
(29 March 2019 AD
12 April 2019 AD
25 June 2019 AD)

house of cards
jacks and jokers
twos and threes
running wild
vacant faces
loaded wallets
crowded rooms

dry bones
wizened teeth
tongue-tied cheeks
feet shuffling

tiny corkscrew
worms gnawing
through what passes
as a brain

high-wire tumble
into this tumbril
wheel-of-fortune-barrow
plentiful cornucopia
copycat horn of luck

clock faces blank
no numbers no hands,
egg-white circles
stuttering uttering
cluttering
flustered minds
meaningless circus sounds

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Querencia

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Querencia
(29 August 1947)

heavy snow all winter
starting in November
continuing through

neighbor plowed us out
arriving as each storm left
sometimes he came in for tea
we became good friends

now he is moving out west
to be with his grand-kids
when he moves we may
be forced to sell up and go
winter snow too much for us
summer grass too much to mow

querencia
it’s a bull-fighting thing
there’s a spot in the bull ring
where each bull chooses
to make his last stand
it’s his chosen place to die
like this is mine

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