CROWS WITHOUT A BARDO
Their calls louder than the day itself
would deafen the moment of death.
A tree of water in the center arcs translucent
branches, pelts its buds, stimulates the blood in
their pin feathers. They are murdering the bowl
in the double decker fountain.
Staccato overlays any time between lives, their wing
span night. Their beaks wrap any past life—
for their disputes are harmonies, their possession
of the fountain supreme. Discordant brown wet mulch
bedding thirsty annuals below the fountain's lip
cannot hold. A two-storied covered wagon—
the plaza of shops sets off into the world.
A lead crow perches, fills my good ear:
This train rolls, to desert or to coast, more
to come than anyone expects,
stops for a bicentennial, infinite
auditory delusions, dawn's early light.
We are hooped! don't trust the old ruts!
I open the parenthesis, climb down.
A black cat crosses the path. The wagon
backs up, lets me by—to take the blues.
Author and eco-activist Mary Gilliland’s award-winning collections are The Devil’s Fools (2022), which won the Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award, and The Ruined Walled Castle Garden (2020), with poems anthologized most recently in Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems on Pregnancy, Abortion & Choice; Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands; and Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose. She is a recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center, a Cornell University Council on the Arts Faculty Grant, and the 2023 International Literary Seminars Kenya/Fence 1st Prize in Poetry. Look for In the pool of the sea’s shoulder, forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. “Crows without a Bardo” is in Gilliland’s new book Ember Days.