A Brief and Personal Litany of Blackbirds

October 2024 | nonfiction

A single gleaming crow feather rises up in a tiny Danish vase on my mantle. It is there to remind me.

When she was too old to drive, whenever we got out of the car and my mother heard a crow calling, she would say, “There’s my crow!”

Crows shower despair in Van Gogh’s “Wheatfield with Crows”; did he hear them cawing before he cut off his ear? Were they scribing in the sky when he took his life? Did he feel their intent to mark his days? Did he count them and their cryptic messages? The sky writhes in blue; the wheat is not bread but tragic gold.  The painting is quietly apocalyptic.

In Andrew Wyeth’s “Winter Fields,” a dead crow claims the foreground, lying in a sere and open field with winter’s neutral sky above it, a house and barn mere specks in a faraway background. Soft and black, the body embodies the silence winter will impose upon us all.  Thin brown grasses, its only covering. According to McCartney, his blackbird singing in the dead of night signifies hope for a black girl in the mayhem of the sixties, but of course his gentle guitar and night singing bird reassure all of us who need that hopefulness in equal measure to shore up against Poe’s unsettling raven.

In the Old Testament, the prophet Elijah was fed by ravens who brought him “bread and meat” in the morning and again at night. According to legend, the hermetic Saint Kevin in the 600s prayed with his hand out the window and was gifted, or cursed, with a blackbird alighting on it and laying its eggs. In Seamus Heaney’s poem the good saint “Is moved to pity” holding out his hand “Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.”

In photos, my young and still single mother in a short red-quilted jacket, smiles in front of a large caged enclosure.  She has just fed a crow that cannot fly who she told me, “talked” to her in its curious crow speak; not the raspy caw-caw, but a series of multi-syllabic quiet chortles at excitement for its food, and she was sure, crow affection. She fed it raw hamburger until it was well enough to take off and fly.  When I was little, I loved hearing this story and she was very good at mimicking what her corvid friend sounded like.  The pictures are old and faded. My mother is gone.

The single crow feather on my mantle belonged to Cassidy Crow, as my daughter dubbed the side-hopping crow who recently descended in our driveway and stared into the sunroom windows, waiting. Of course I came out with some whole grain bread. She (yes, I am projecting my gender onto this bird) flew up into the locust tree then alighted near the bread as I returned to the house. She was there the next day and I did my research on what humans could feed crows: peanuts—who knew?!  So now, it became a three month-long ritual to watch for her appearance, which was at least twice a day, then hurry out with shelled peanuts which she would eat. She was always alone and if other crows were seen or heard in the vicinity, she disappeared. We couldn’t figure out why she seemed to be used to being fed, or why she appeared to be a timid outcast among other crows who usually appear together, at least in twos. Another unsettling trouble arose: I had taken to calling her by cawing and saying her name. If she were close, she’d appear. But I was also signaling the squirrels who quickly learned that my cawing meant peanuts! It was upsetting to see that she would relinquish her food to these interlopers as if she were afraid of them. I wanted her to stand up for herself! But she remained timid.

Shortly after she appeared, I found one large sleek black feather near the peanuts and have kept it as the only token of her presence which I came to love, as she disappeared completely after three months. I still ponder the mystery surrounding her appearance and disappearance. Surely she was a sign, a marker that briefly inscribed itself on our lives. Surely, she could have been my mother’s crow, reappearing to let us know that hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul and often comes in the darkest of colors if only we will look and see it.

Raphael H Kosek

Raphael Kosek is the author of American Mythology (Brick Road Poetry Press) and two prize-winning chapbooks, Harmless Encounters (2022) and Rough Grace (2014). Her work has received 4 Pushcart nominations and was featured in The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily. She served as the 2019-2020 Dutchess County, NY Poet Laureate and teaches at Dutchess Community College. www.raphaelkosek.com

Time Machine

October 2024 | nonfiction

It doesn’t track or alter time, and it’s not a machine. It has no moving parts.

It’s a clear plastic contraption about six inches high with seven plastic disks in pastel colors. Each disk is labeled with a day of the week and has an a.m. and a p.m. side, marked with sun and moon respectively.

It’s a pill holder for my prescription meds and supplements.

Once a week I line the disks up on my kitchen table and snap them open. I take the pill bottles out of the cupboard and, one at a time, shake out my week’s supply and deposit them in the correct slots. I snap them shut and insert them back into their holder, ready for the next week.

I used to keep a cobalt blue ceramic bowl on the table in which I dumped random quantities of each pill. Every morning and evening I’d pick out what I needed to take at that time. It worked fine—the pills were handy, and I rarely forgot to take them. I’d add more as they ran low. I’d never have bought a special gizmo to hold my pills—it was a free perk through my health insurance plan.

I’m aware of the passage of time when I turn calendar pages—September already, summer’s over—and on my October birthday: Whoosh, there goes another one. I see the signs when I look in the mirror, when my race pace gets a little slower on each 10K, when my daughter is suddenly middle-aged. We all recall how time seemed to drag torturously when we were kids—would school never end? Would Christmas ever come? And then how it started to rocket by, faster and faster, as we got older. But that’s to be expected—we live with it, laugh it off. C’est la vie.

But now. Once a week. Every week. I consider the seven empty disks. And I think, no, it can’t be. Another week already? Didn’t I just fill them the other day? Where has the time gone?

“I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.” T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock was ruminating on the passage of time and the meaning of life.

I could re-employ the blue bowl. Toss the pill holder in the recycling bin. Or repurpose the disks—store paper clips, safety pins, thumb tacks. But there’s no going back. I’ll still hear the days ticking away. I’m measuring out my life seven pills at a time.

Alice Lowe

Alice Lowe’s flash nonfiction has been published this past year in Tangled Locks, Bridge VIII, Skipjack Review, Change Seven, Bluebird Word, Eunoia, and MORIA. She has been twice cited in Best American Essays. Alice writes about life, literature, food, and family in San Diego, California. Read and reach her at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.