Raven, One Morning

Lon Young

One morning we dug up the raven I’d raised
in a bushel basket that summer, do you remember?
Who for slips of fish and grubs winged me into dark woods,
who knew the speech of discord and of the spleen,

whose black eye bore through the face you preferred
I wore. He saw worms but did not flinch.
After the Daltons slung him from their radishes
ringing with buck shot, and after you pried a shovel

into breakfast demanding to know where he’d been buried,
Dad damned Oprah, damned her festerence of shrinks,
damned the day I shimmied down a pine with a knapsack for a nest.
He’s got to see it dead, again and again you rasped.

And the wind played tricks with his feathers.
I had just turned fourteen. The earth behind the tractor shed
had pores in it. Remember how there were pores?
And how deep Dad had tried to dig? Dogs, he said. But it was us.

’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother—I’ve that within
which passeth show. And the raven’s shadows
loosed themselves in our hands from the clay.
Keep your shovel. Let me go down with a chisel this black.

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