|
JULY 31ST, 1997, THREE BLACK RAVENS
Three juvenile ravens are behind the saplings of the huge paper bark tree outside, the sky fills in my big broad window with its length and height, it is the only native tree to be framed from the southern side of the house, it rises above the concrete and the native birds preen and squawk in its branches, their black feathers ruffled up by serious wind, that scatters the grey cloud across that smoother darker bluer shade, which is the melbourne sky, that makes me moody and still towards sunset, all my life complexities have operated inside my mind like black hail, and now these crows were trying to teach me something, 'watch us live,' they said, 'it's simple.' I knew that I had felt this simple when I had been kneeling stunned, in the rough pink crystals of a South Australian salt lake, then Binda came in for his deep afternoon pat and his eyes said, 'simply love me this afternoon,' so I did, then I called Kindi's name, she always waits in the background, like in all my life the black rain and frozen hail, and me waiting indoors or trying to shelter myself against it with a tree or umbrella, it's this simple, the ravens looked into the sky, I know that they were amongst the twenty percent who had survived, I noticed my own shattered hands, already in my early thirties curling into claws, the sky the birds, the wind was all out there, and the dogs, they always waited and whined all day for their walk out there, away from my books and possessions, housework and bills, carpet and lawns, what was I waiting for?, as soon as I thought it would get simple, there would be room for the big sun again, yet the simpler that blue sky was, the less I had trusted it, I had known very early in my life about things that the crows taught me now, but I had been handed a faulty umbrella with spokes like broken bicycle wheels, and told to shield myself against all kinds of storms, that in the end had become as much imaginary as real, I had to remember something that I had forgotten, that the ravens knew now, something that the sky was telling me in its smooth afternoon tones, that the wind was saying I should listen to. |
