Black Bird

by Anne Myles

My old dog alerts at something across the grass

from the path we’re walking on—the bobbing head

of a large black bird, pecking at something fallen.

I urge her forward, but she keeps turning back to see—

ears up, muscles tensed, prey-driven in a way

that feels unlike her, so for a second a different dog

quivers on the leash—her predecessor who’d strain

and whine at glowing eyes she spotted in the dark.

And I keep turning too, because I can’t make out—

looking from shadow into sun, and from this angle—

whether the bird’s a crow, a raven maybe, or a vulture.

It’s unsettling to be unsure: is it the piercing messenger 

from the flocks that wheeled above the college spires,

cawing revelations I might on any day wake up to,

or the proverbial scavenger of death, pacing stiffly

in its dusty feathers, its gruesome appetite, unabashed 

by the fleshy ugliness of its head? (Though truthfully,

if it’s a vulture it’s a small one, a junior vulture,

and I feel almost tender toward it as it pecks away,

knowing it’s not lurking for either of us this afternoon.)

Soon enough we’re past it, further down the street

in a graceful neighborhood in this city that twists

moment to moment between home and strangeness,

between choice and the terrible randomness 

of age without commitments, between what I came for

and what I found. Crow or vulture—the image slides

back and forth in mind; something I might have known

yet needed to keep in play, in the queasy freedom

of indeterminacy. It reminds me of the optical illusion

where, as you stare at it, the drawing keeps shifting 

between a be-hatted young lady with an elegant jawline

turning her face away, and an old woman with hook nose

casting her gaze down. How can you choose just one?

Or how can I, grasping this moment that I am both:

the tender ingenue (so vivid still my hopeful flights,

my glossy plumage!) and the crone she turns into;

the one with a black ribbon taut around her throat

to signify both beauty and the circling of some pain

she doesn’t yet have words for, and the one who looks

inside herself with her wrinkled eye, her narrow lips

pressed tightly over all she might yet choose to say.