Crows

I take a handful of unsalted peanuts and give them a hurl onto the grass and try in my hurl to scatter them as much as possible. The crows are all waiting, perched on telephone wires and roofs and trees. As soon as the peanuts hit the ground they come swooping down from different directions. Their flight is smooth and agile, their movements quick and acrobatic. These are highly intelligent birds. If they get too close to one another they caw loudly and go on the attack. I love the way their feathers fan out and catch the air. The comical hop they do to cross a patch of ground. Their phenomenal alertness and sensitivity.

I add a two-pound bag of unsalted peanuts to our groceries while visiting the produce section at the grocery store. More peanuts for the crows. The man at the cash register is familiar. He’s worked at the store a long time. He always sings. He sings everything, whatever the exchange may be at the checkout stand. He’ll sing “how are you” and “is that all” and “are those cookies your cookies” in a baritone operatic voice. I frequently want to join him in song but I’m afraid he’d think I was making fun of him. I mean to ask if he sings in a choir but I’m often so taken by his singing and wanting to sing along that I forget to ask him if he sings in a group or ensemble.  

Crows are associated with death. It’s their black feathers. And their knowing demeanor. Crows always seem to know something. I find it uncanny how they can hear me leave the apartment building within seconds and come flying from a respectable distance.

I guess that’s why they’re called – in groups – a murder of crows. But I don’t find death in crows. Death is everywhere. Everywhere there’s life, there’s also death. I don’t associate death with crows. I find them lively in the extreme. Their energy is contagious. They feed greedily and bicker but when in the air they’re the very model of grace.

In world mythology, the crow is often represented as an irritant, or a favorite of the gods, or Norse giants. In a Sioux legend, the people are starving because the crows – which are white – keep warning the buffalo of the approach of hunters. The leader of the crows is captured by stealth and tied to a rock with a rawhide string. An angry hunter lunges at the crow and throws him into a fire. The crow escapes, but is singed black, and ever since all crows are black.

English poet and children’s writer Ted Hughes devoted an entire collection of poems to the crow, published in 1971 and titled (aptly) Crow. He describes the crow variously as a being of prophecy and mischief, a hierophant, “humped, impenetrable,” a creature of “delirious joy, with nimble balance,” refrigerating an emptiness, and “with the faintest breath,” “melts cephalopods and sorts raw numbers out of their dregs.” Hughes’s crows are conduits of weird spiritual forces; ageless, inscrutable, unfathomable. “And he realized that God spoke crow – Just existing was His revelation.”

God speaks crow. That’s good.

Crows occasionally make a rattling sound, or clicks. I have no idea what their meaning is, what is intended, what is being remarked. And I like that. The mystery of it, the nonsense of it, the uniqueness and peculiarity of it. It’s primordial. But also a little silly. A goofy sound. Wacky, yet also a little mindful. Savvy, alert, fascinated.