Mary Fontana

Murder

Raven’s younger, coarser sister,
no legends cloak her.
No reputation as savior, trickster.
Brought no light.

In skeletal elms
at the end of the block
her klatch, contentious,
drowns human talk.

I notice no black cloud
of wings rushing the sunrise,
only that at some juncture
the trees lose their loud.

Crow stomachs carrion,
guzzles eggs. To eat her
is to take humiliation
to bride. In late December,

earth-bound at my window, when
day’s been dimming a long time—
in this northern clime
it’s never truly light

after the leaves quit clinging—
I see her, see them, bodies like holes
snipped in murk, winging
in threes and fours diagonally

across the sky, always
southwest to northeast,
converging on some unseen
point like vultures to a bone

table. They call without
harmony, harsh argument
at odds with the concerted
ecliptic of their flight,

its ragged edge like rotting
cloth. Tethered to a hole,
a scrabble of hatchlings, oh, I’d kill
to know what they were plotting.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mary Fontana’s first book, a narrative history of the migrant hospitality house where she has volunteered for two decades, is forthcoming from Orbis Books. Her poems and criticism have appeared in Prairie Schooner, ONLY POEMS, The Seneca Review, MER Literary, SWWIM, Moss and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle.