My teenage bedroom was a holding pattern
in a rental near the border, old house foreclosed
and boxes still unpacked like a promise.
On the last, long drive to school,
lulled by the static fields and inertia clouds,
the yellow bus bolted ahead like electricity
dashing crow's winged silhouette to the ditch.
My thighs burned running back
to the patch of dirt portending death
where she lay panting, eyes extreme.
Swaddled in my Led Zeppelin shirt,
her tongue stabbed air, sputtering blood
on the black cotton invisibly.
She was not my fairytale, backyard crow
who took a mate and flew away one day,
maybe to the oceanside — far from this valley —
where the street guy stacked stones
as talismans or a welcome post,
shifting objects like boxes in a new room,
transforming the ocean's ruins into form,
like a crow shifting shape.
Slowing gasps, she shifted away.
Farther down the transforming road,
I sat on a brine-bleached wall
to the noise of greater shapes
by the stones angled just so
where I found crow magic again.
