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I hear crows at the far end of a telephone line. Before I can stop them one or two have come through. For hours they caw about inside my mind. Nothing I can do will silence them.
    ~
    A crow settles on the balcony rail and stares at me through the glass. I go out carefully to talk to it. It does not fly away. I try to explain myself and it listens to me with its crow eyes sceptical, wide. I tell it that the birds I speak of are metaphors only, that I would not presume to speak of crows-in-fact. I tell it that it is not it I name, but a part of a system within and about me, in my own human space, and that it is welcome to treat me, as a human, in much the same way. As a symbol of poisoned corn, perhaps, or bad weather, a storm. I tell it that it is a matter of colour alone, a strange prejudice we have. Perhaps that, and what we can only hear as a harshness in its cry. Which it will repeat, as it flies overhead, as if it would not listen to anything we said.
    ~
    To predict the actions of the human, reflects the crow, one must think with the mind of the human. Walking down George Street on an overcast morning, late winter, there is an edginess at the side of things, hovering beside me as I pass a confectioner’s, retreating at the recessed windows by the Strand Arcade, disappearing into the stone wall of the GPO, flashing in and out of a blind-spot with a passing car. Hypocrite , I want to spit at it, familiar compoun d ! Black shoes, black jeans, black jacket, flash of white from my shirt front. Nobody listening.
    ~
    The way I see it, which is the way I sometimes imagine others see it also, I have committed many crimes, but they have always been crimes of love. They have always been done for it, and from it. And I have wanted to say this for a long time now, if only to that other crow, that soft crow, that crow-without-beak-or-claws, that spreads out its wings, to sleep each night on my eyes.
    What are the crimes of love, anyway, but fragments of passion broken from their moorings, evidence of a kind of shipwreck? (But what kind of ship? Where was it? What was its name ?) Or crows, a flock of them, high in the air, fighting against a wind that no-one can see.
    ~
    When I lie down at last, far into the night, the darkness seems to leave me and, retreating to corners, the space under the bed, assumes a more natural shape, eventually filling the room. In the early hours I realise that a crow is there, perched high on the suitcases up on top of the wardrobe, a bit like Poe’s raven but also not. Crows are not entirely responsible for their crowness, it is trying to tell me: often, within the mind of the crow, there is a flock of crows circling, driving the crow towards itself. If we could see into the minds of these crows, it is telling me – the crows within the crow – we would find, in many of them, flocks of crows, circling or moving about on the ground there, grown hard and sharp with the warring of the crows inside them.
    ~
    I stare at the page, thinking of nothing I could readily say. Words, in my abstraction, begin to lose definition. The page begins to exceed its borders, becoming as wide as the sky. A white sky, as it sometimes will be in winter, and in it a flock of crows, in obscure formations. Hieroglyphs. Moving slowly.
    We dream of honesty, of openness, but openness can be lacerating. What can be more honest than a crow’s cry? What can be more open than a crow’s wings as it hovers above a cornfield?

A.
    Over and again one comes to the City, like the death of one’s father, one’s mother, worst love, the worst or the greatest pleasure, a thing one can never adequately write about although one tries all one’s life, over and again shuffling the disparate fragments knowing that somehow they belong together, never finding the key – a place exotic and unapproachable, though time after time one comes to its gates and stares inward, through the dark, weathered timber, at the steady