My friend’s dad tracks the roosting patterns of the crows in Portland.
The best place to witness it is just in front of the Hawthorne bridge,
where the winter-dead trees release thousands of them,
pouring out like uncorked champagne.
It terrifies my mother:
the cawing, the sudden darkness, the way the sky fills so suddenly and so intentionally.
I think it’s the power; how something so small can create night out of day,
and settle onto a branch as if nothing has occurred at all.
Borrowing power. Dragging it with their beaks. Dancing.
I don’t know what crows think they do.
The Illustrated American Wildlife describes them as “man’s chief avian enemy.”
It also describes them as the most intelligent of birds. The two are connected, of course.
I have a small print with a sideways house and a jagged knife that says in scrawly handwriting
I WANT TO LOVE SOMETHING SIMPLY,
from an artist I didn’t know.
Since my heart was a little broken I thought it was true.
I think, probably, the easiest way to make love simple is to fall out of it.
He rolls over, away from me, and in the quiet moments after waking he says
this feels like the silence that would come after proposing a divorce.
I think of my mom sitting across a table from my dad:
I don’t love you anymore, she might’ve said.
But that couldn’t have been simple.
Now I have five siblings instead of one, two of them steps, two of them halves.
One is five and I love her like she came from my own womb
which also isn’t simple.
An island farmer offered fifty cents apiece for crows, to eat the bugs that killed his crops,
and somehow, when a boy told me that he’d be a crow if he could be anything,
all I thought of was flying.
There are other things. In Sweden crows are considered the ghosts of murdered men.
Like the way he waved at me from the street while I was looking out the window.
Or how he has to take sleeping pills on airplanes.
The Portland crow roost’s official website says they have documented as many as 16,910 roosting crows at once. A year ago I drove underneath the roost on my way back to Bellingham and sobbed.
Similarly, I think, the easiest way to make love simply is in complete darkness.
I don’t know what crows think they do.
They are considered the ultimate monogamists,
but no one can explain the third bird that occasionally shares the nest.
You, me, God.
You, me, and the bird that hits the window.
None of it said with a wink.
I’ve been scared on airplanes before. The last time was only a few weeks ago:
the descent bumped us all over the place, the seatbelt sign flashed a few times;
I stared out the window, and then at a woman wrapped in a man’s arms,
hoping he was a stranger to her.
(I think, for a second, that the absence of love is the only simple thing.)
How utterly ridiculous it is to fly, I thought; like toy cars we played with as kids,
the ones you pull backwards and let go of, that burst forward with all that pent up motion
as far as it wants to travel.
No, there are other reasons to envy the crows,
like how they can tell the difference between a man, and a man with a gun.