Traveling with Crows

What keeps us?

Wind, wings, and wizardry keep us
next to the promise of spring, even
rivermud drying on the dog
tells us things can change.

In the middle of a moonless night,
stars obscured by clouds, rain
pelting on, what can we
but hunker down in our own limbs,

remember how to caress ourselves?
Stark mornings do come on then
when the sky as it might could be
translucent as wings, delicious

fruit for any kind of day at all.
Like yesterday.  Along the roadway,
spinning into motion, small seeds
take to air, the owl with talons carved

toward some bloody meal.  Even
the coyote by the roadside so much
a dog on the hearth, ears tipped,
tail flung out to full stride.

Still spring comes.
Still the river greens its way onward.
Still the trout will rise and snap all the weak
lines, bursting sunwater realm
beyond understanding.

Resolutions

Asked what we're giving up, what we're making up for the New Year, and I have no pat answers this time.  I have decided to limit myself to a word, vulnerability.  The word becomes a statement, Be vulnerability.  I think about the trees in my yard, standing maple against the onslaught of winter storm.  Their armor is their woody essence, and their essence is their vulnerability.  Though they are hardwoods, they do not think "hardwood" into the wind.  I know I have.  I have bound myself to hardness, to creating a shell, and leaned into the wind defiantly.  Yesterday, among the tidepools of La Jolla, I admired the delicate fronds of sea kelp waving into the currents that rose through shallow rocks from open ocean, and I found hermit crabs.  They gather a shell to live in, pull it on and gently rock it toward debris good enough to eat.  Their antennae are delicate and accurate.  But the shell they put on, hard as it is, is not part of their thoughts.  It will be discarded soon enough, when the eating and the molting make it cramped and difficult to maneuver.  I think of all my old shells, and my similar taste for them, and the ways I thought myself into them, letting my thoughts run through the shells, animating them.  Now I want to discard the need for all of that for 2007 and beyond.  There is warmth enough here to do it.  I let my thoughts ride out with the tide.