Not Magic

Three crows everywhere, far as I can tell. This morning, taking the compost out, they were on a dead snag in a Chestnut Oak; stopped at the lake, to roll a smoke, and there they were cleaning a picnic table; pulled over, to get a dead raccoon off the road, where the Barbecue Place used to be, and they were competing for a perch on a bush that wouldn't support them all; at Raven Rock they flew over in a vee; none at the museum, but Carma's, in tile. Another day cleaning and tomorrow I have to put things away in the basement, for weeks we've not put things away, because there wasn't time, now, you can barely move down there and the tools are akimbo. D hates that now I'm the guy that gets to go to the basement, far from prying eyes, and work at whatever pace I decide. I said to Sara's husband, Clay, that if he was getting cards printed, I wanted some too:

Southern Ohio Museum
Janitor

I don't want promotion. It took me years to get here. I don't care what my title is, or handle (I'm sensitive about nicknames, there are two people who call be Tommy, and one who calls me Tomas, D tends to call me Old Fart, and that's cool, I call him Lard-Ass, still, I would never trust him with an ice-pick. He lunges.) Then on the way home the fucking crows are on the job, they've called ahead, they have a beacon on my truck. There are so many balls in the back of my truck, I was looking at them tonight, while I was looking for the bug, you know, someone watching, and started laughing. I could have choked to death, I was laughing so hard, not a bad way to go. Forty balls in the back of the truck, recent balls, I have become selective, and, still, forty balls. Three crows in the road on a squirrel that is completely flattened; and then I get home and those same three original crows are in position. What would you make of that? why do crows travel in threes? is that ugly sound actually a language? Run full-circle.

Tom

The spring rains
and plum blossoms:
blackberry canes, the
way things explode,
I never thought to ask.