Black Transit
       

Trees bare. Days short. And at dusk
crows pour through the sky in strands.
From a point in the east too small
to feed your eye on, they pop
into being as sharp dark stars, and then
are large, and then are here, pouring west.
Something chilling about it,
though they are birds like any birds.

What's fishy is the orchestration, all of them
with a portion of the one same mind: they fly
as if the path were laid, as if
there were runnels in the air, molding
their way to the roost. Whose location
no one seems to know—if they did,
you'd think there would be chitchat
in the market about the volume
of their screams, as if women were being
dragged by the hair through the woods
at night. But everybody keeps mum—
it seems we're in cahoots with them
without knowing what's the leverage
they possess (though we can feel it)
to extract from us this pact, this vow.

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Copyright © 2012 Lucia Perillo All rights reserved
from On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths
Copper Canyon Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission