Brains so sharp they know everything at once
and don’t sort it into parts, their caw, caw, caw
parsed only by the dead in the stench of the gut.
Two crows or one: sorrow and joy have nothing
to do with them. Meat does, and the eyes of lambs,
and rotting matter. In the high boughs of the spruce
they tuck their feet beneath their robes and take confession.
Go on—it’s you who gives them that, their black
Madonnas, their worry beads of bones.
They have no gods of punishment or absolution.
They have no stations. Yet, without exception,
they dote on their young, give them what they lac,
pluck the songbird’s newly hatched like living plums.
~ from The Wrong Cat (McClelland & Stewart, 2015)
