#49
Have you studied the flight of crows?
They are always agitated, urgent.
Vultures teeter like drunken sots,
Cranes' wings beat insistent blows,
And hawks float lazily fluent --
Crows flap like worried thoughts.
Last week, I saw a hundred rise
From a wheat field recently mown.
They wheeled and as one dropped down,
As though they no longer feared my eyes.
The painter saw them rise and flee
Beyond a path through the wheat,
Into darkening skies, where he couldn't see.
He painted going forward and retreat.