The crows, maybe one needy crow, comes and stands on The lights stanchion by the carport. Caws that rhyrmic vocal tattoo, his message: I’m here, time to feed me.
And so the ceremic plate hoisted its three-foot stand gets filled with cat food kibble and grapes, an apparent crow delectation. (The cats, too, come around for the kibble that, I supposed, is rightly theirs. And the rats.
They crows come, they take. This one crow — my friend Diane believes it is always the same crow, her friend — comes, dips, takes a grape or some kibble, flies off.
It is said crows will bring you a gift. So far, there has only been a chicken bone. a treasure from one of these black-winged carnivor.
The poet Ted Huges meditated on the crow’s blackness:
Black the brain with its tombed visions
A black rainbow bends its empitness over emptiness.
Dark. Very dark.
Brighter and so white are the gulls that sat, days ago, high up on the tiled roof of the Sistine Chapel nearby the tin stove pipe that would eventually emit the white smoke and announced the choice of a new Catholic pontiff.
White fellows from the sea that can be found wherever offal or discarded protein can be found. They now and then tilted their heads sharply back, as they will do, and screeched their keow or cow-cow-cow.
Long live the Pope!
But how long will those gulls, so amusingly unaware they were being seen by billions of mortals, gathering, as birds will gather, on the ancient chapel roof for unknown reasons (probably hoping someone in the multitude in the wide square below would drop a pizza crust.) — how long will they live? How long pursue their career foraging in Roman garbage?
Who, coming upon one of those seabirds down an alley or devouring their cast-off cafe table scraps along the Via Venito , will realize that there is a worldwide celebrity under their table, a guardian of the pipe that was soon to spew its portentious white cloud announcing a new chapter in Christendom’s history?
Where and when will their airborne journey end — for those crows in Largo? Those gulls in Rome?
Remember Jonathan Livingston Seagull? Literary hero of the distant Seventies? Steeped in personal reflection far exceeding the likely capacity of the average bird’s brain. That’s fantasy for you.
But those are real birds in Rome, real crows in Largo. But now just beeks in the avian crowd.
But somebody should paint them, from memory, of course. They’ll never pose.
I don’t know how Audubon did it.
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