Crow Angel

Spring 2000

Burnell lives in a nursing home now.
His house down the lane is for sale but it is tiny and shares our flood zone and no one has looked at it twice.
Which is all right with us.
The field above his is on a hillside and somebody else farms it in wheat every other year or so. We have never
seen that farmer to talk to though we have seen his tracks.
So Gulliver and I have claimed walking rights and the early morning hillside is ours, mostly.

Last winter, after a couple of good snows, Gully and I were hiking our usual trail which follows the deer tracks
up along the edge of the woods and across at the top of the hill
where they disappear into the tall brambles. The snow, crunched in
layers beneath us, tells the story of that winter’s storms from snow to ice and back again
like the rings of the old man’s walnut tree.

Gulliver ran out ahead, as all trusty Bernese Mountain Dogs do, to test the trail and
to make safe the passage of the two footed human bringing up the rear. Treading carefully I chronicled the
changes in terrain and noticed a new series of tiny tracks in the snow
which merged in fine lines like a precisely engineered train station.
The addition of just a few more inches of snow pack seemed to have
offered the delicacy of the topmost tips of the scattering of wheat stalks to the birds
who had winter over with us along the Little Conewago Creek.

Up ahead Gully was intent on some treasure buried in a snow bank
and I paused to take in the sunrise throught the opposite tree line.
It’s rays of impossibly brilliant orange silhouetting the wheat
like fuzz on a Fawn Grove July peach.
After dutiful obeisance I noticed an unfamiliar mark at my feet.
Sharply outlined and jagged in detail the marks in the snow before me
were mysterious and inviting.
The suns’ continued path of rising gave definition to the form,
revealing the perfect imprint of a bird.
Oval length of body layed gently in the newly fallen snow, she had paused long enough to lay down her wings.
Each feathers’ point crisp as freshly ironed linen.
Then lifted up with no tract of effort into flight.

A Crow Angel.