Portrait Of A Raven

Portrait of a Raven Winter, spring, summer and fall are my favorite season. I am a raven. I steal because I need. My family make no excuses for our actions; we live how we live and we let others know we’re alive. Lamar snow and chilly forty below, four-thirty sunset with week empty-stomach, we lean close-in -my three brothers and I – on a bleached aspen limb. We watch three silent dirty white wolves stalk. A spiraling circle, separating buffalo, the old and slow, to deep fields where plucking is easy. There is no fear, this is our late dinner. My throaty caw startles the world awake. From low within winter’s shallow silent bed, I bring Yellowbells back to life. Rare spring calm, tonight, cloudless, circling, stirring the wind, shielding stars – twinkle. I dance in my vespers. In the early hours, I hop sideways down main street of Mammoth. On the sun-warmed concrete, in a world disconnect from mine. I find not what is true, real, or natural. I scream hell at three million passersby. I apologize for nothing. One eye looks to the future and one eye to the past; with the low slung noon sun, perched in a Cottonwood carcass high above a red-leaved Bog Bush, I use Winter’s breath to tell how it is: I am the running blue of both river and sky, purple perfume of flower fields,

whispering campfire smoke that trails you around the rock ring, and you’ll not guess, but I am the void of the starry sky, and after black storms, I am the rainbow.