Crows and Snow

 

Crows and Snow

The bay is packed in ice with snow from shore to shore

where the great moon tide comes in all creaking,

inexorably lifting that ponderous protesting mass.

Across the white reach the far shore stretches unbroken and virgin,

not one cabin, one dwelling, to send its’ light across to me

and the only bird here in this bitter cold of winter’s wind

Is the crow – flying solitaire with flapping scrutiny of the intruder.

But now that I have come often enough to the field and the tide

they have come to fly in pairs – slow steady beats of their wings

and we accept one another.

The bay packed with snow and ice from shore to shore

heaved randomly into giant statuesque stroboplosions of ice sculpture

as in some slow motioned dream of crows and snow

by the living tide, venting itself against the unseen living rock

– yet I know the Smelts come soon and so too the Tom Cod.

Is it this visibly frozen cold that is their dream

or is it the spring to come?

69

the most magical bay in my first venture into the past of my youth in 1970 -

West Bay, an arm of Gouldsboro Bay in Maine.

© stephen n mckinney