Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

 

On the EVE of the THREE KINGS

 

At sunset, the crows can be seen

as they fly in, to their winter quarters,

roosting in the multiple hundreds.

 

At first you only see one, then 2, then

5, then 5 more. Then 10; 25; 5; until

slowly, never overwhelmingly, you

have counted over 500. They are all

going to their gathering place. Pines

absorb the dark bodies & barren

 

trees fill with feathers where leaves

were. Where a single crow would

fall to a silent owl, the crows prevail.

 

At dawn, they leave. Each night

& each morning, the same crows

come & go. Dusk after dawn; dawn

 

after dusk. Watching the crows

cross a thick strip of orange sky

below a layer of blue cloud, i sit

in my wheel chair concentrating

on making my right foot twitch

for the first time in over a year.

 

Douglas Rothschild is an idea once embodied in a poem. Today he remains the unnamable. He is sorry. Maybe he can make it next time. His books include Theogony (Subpress).

 

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx