among all animals i have written about, the crow is my most favoured subject matter, probably because it is so common that we can hardly distinguish one from another in physical appearance, just like myself, but who knows what is the inner reality in each and every one of them?
[the bulk of this chapbook was accepted early in 2016 for publication by barometer pressures press, but released back to me because the publisher supposedly stopped all her literary operations later last year]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Crows
By
Yuan Changming
Table of Contents
1/ My Crow
2/ Calls of a
Crow
3/ The Black
Bird
4/ The Crow and
the Butterfly
5/ My Crow, My
Other Life
6/ Truncated
Truths (5): My Crow
7/ Crows in the
Sunlight
8/ White Crow:
a Parallel Poem
9/ Wintry
Vision
10/ Winterscaping: Crow vs Snow
11/ My Crow: A Martyr of Truth
12/ The Crow Cornered
13/ The Lifestyle of a Crow
14/ The
Human-Headed Crow
15/ Natural Confrontation: Crow
16/ My Inner Crow
17/ Crow’s View
18/ The Art of Origami
19/ Oriental Metaphysics
20/ C.R.O.W.
21/ Birds of Varied
Feathers: A Confucian Vision
My Crow
As an ancient Chinese saying
goes
Crows everywhere are equally
black
But this one in the backyard
of my heart
Is as white as a summer cloud
I have fed him with fog and frost
Until his feathers, his flesh
His calls and even his spirit
All turned into white like
winter washed
My crow’s wings will never melt
Even when flying close to the
sun
The Calls of a Crow
How many times
Have you lain in thick
darkness
Imagining a white crow
That you wish to see
Or rather to be
Not until the other morning
Did you hear a wild bird
crying
Like a persistent knock
At the door of your heart
Beyond your curtained window
Beyond your curtained dream
It was a crow hammering all
its white yaws
Right into your soul
Resonating with your truer
selfhood
The Black Bird
so little triggers
off
a black bird
the nexus of antithesis
foiled with snow
light
to fly into the vast history
of
gray
The Crow and the Butterfly
you like the crows in your
backyard
other birds are much less
plain
but they fly too high
or too far for your heart
stranded
here
you envy the butterfly in
your frontyard
The most beautiful
thought also most lonely
As the spring sets
under
her floral wings
My Crow, My Other Life
Every morning, even before I
open
My eyes, the little doors of
the cage
My crow cannot wait to
flutter out
Into the light-washed heavens
Striking its transparent
wings into beating
Every night, even after I put
The cage back inside my cozy
house
The bird still glides close
to the moon
With its wings feathered with
spirits
Forgetting to return home
Sometimes I wonder why
Day after day, night after
night
It refuses to settle softly
in its cage
Like a domesticated parrot
Were I it, would I?
Or you, once the cage broken
Would the bird return
Coo itself into sleep, dreaming
Of celestial freedom?
Truncated Truths (5): My Crow
Each crow you have seen
Has a quasi white soul
That used to dwell in the
body
Of one of your closest
ancestors
He comes down all the way
just to tell you
His little secret, the way he
has flown out
Of darkness, the fact both
his body and heart
Are filled with shadows, the
truth about
Being a dissident, that
unwanted color
Hidden in your own heart is
there also a crow
Not blacker than his spirits
But much more so than his
feathers
Crows in the Sunlight
Soon after their dreamless
roosting
The crows on the boughs begin
to look up
Some ready to fly, some to
land
Beyond the darkest moments of
last night
Disturbed by their calls, a
solitary squirrel
Climbing down the tree,
crossing the fence
To a pasture no greener than
the leaves
But there is certainly more
sunshine
More photosynthesizing, under
the golden film
As I walk past, neither the
crows
Nor the squirrel bothers to
notice my presence
Why should they be startled
away? It is me
Trespassing a new territory
between day and night
Where the crows hide their
night-dyed feathers
White Crow: a Parallel Poem
You have never seen a white
crow
You have never hoped to see
one
But you have made this white
enough:
You’d rather be than see such a crow
Wintry Vision
Two little crows
Popping up
From nowhere
Try to
Establish themselves:
Two truths
On the skeletal tree top
Yawing fiercely
Towards the sky, the wind,
the buildings
The fields and the entire
afternoon
All so fluffy white
In jade-toned snow
Winterscaping: Crow vs Snow
Like billions of dark butterflies
Beating their wings
Against nightmares, rather
Like myriads of
Spirited coal-flakes
Spread from the sky
Of another world
A heavy black snow
Falls, falling, fallen
Down towards the horizon
Of my mind, where a little crow
White as a lost patch
Of autumn fog
Is trying to fly, flapping
From bough to bough
My Crow: A Martyr of Truth
your heavy wings used to be
feathered with light whims
your black feathers used to
be
white as your pure spirits
but your throat was so often
choked with dark truths, and
knowing too many of them
has made you infamous
you cannot be distinguished
from one another, but you can
tell all humans apart, even
their shadows
as you keep announcing
unwelcome truths
you hope to redeem every lie
in a snowy world
Is telling dark truths always
so boldly that has
Blackened your whole being
inside out?
The Crow Cornered
Still, still hidden
Behind old shirts and pants
Like an inflated sock
Hung on a slanting coat hanger
With a prophecy stuck in its
throat
Probably too dark or ominous
To yaw, even to breathe
No one knows when or how
It will fly out of the
closet, and call
The
Lifestyle of a Crow
Instead of pecking around on the ground
For grain or gold to satisfy your hunger
You keep flying all day long, trying
To fetch feathers stuck in muddy history
Twigs far beyond Adam’s continent, and
Rice stems from summer fields, with which
You long to build a permanent nest
High on the top of the tallest Douglas fir
Where you can live closest to heaven
But you may be shot down by a hunter
When flapping towards divinity
The Human-Headed Crow
(An
ancient artifact displayed in Jinzhou Museum)
That human-headed bird
Flapping its wings against
Foreign visitations must have been
Either possessed by the spirit of
My previous life
Or winged by the body of
My next being; otherwise
It would never bother to
Look up at me
As it flies into the same legend
About the yellow crane
All its feathers fall down
On my sandy mind, like meteorites
With all their secrets hardened
From an other universe
Natural Confrontation:
Crow
A wounded, fledgling crow
Yaws invisibly
Above its shadowy voice
As if to convey the message
About the darkness of tomorrow night
To the whole world, where a heavy snow
Has just started to fall, falling
My Inner Crow
after so many years
the white crow
i had been keeping as a pet
finally flew away
without a single moment
of hesitation
through the back window
blown open
by a gust of wild wind
last night
into the storm of
black snowflakes
falling down
right from heaven
Crow's View
you like to hide your pupils
in the blue of the autumn sky
when clouds collide with each other
you enjoy shining down
like a pair of invisible suns, seeing
the gliding birds above corn fields
the moving shadows of hills
the reflections in the water of an unknown lake
a wild flower blooming by the river bank
a colony of ants busy transporting foods beside an
oak tree
a lilac seed blown out of a metal fence
and a vision drifting around a human head
you saw, you see, you are seeing
even though your eyes are closed
The Art of Origami
Each time I run short of inspirations
I would try to fold the dull season
Not into a decoration
But into a bird
I always hang it high
Above my head
Like my own spirit
Like my white crow, where I
Can hear the droning complaints of
Each creature over its pain
The pity is, my senses are often too soft
To hold the shape firm
Oriental
Metaphysics
No, it
was
It is
Not a crow
That has
just flown by
In
stillness
But a
spectre
(in a
crow’s shape?)
A whim
(about a
crane?)
Or a
glyph
(standing
for a cuckoo?)
That can
actually
Flap away
Neither
from your agitated heart
Nor from
my meditating mind
Like the
butterfly
In a
Zhuangzian dream
C.R.O.W.
C
a Phoenician throw-stick
held high in his right hand
the Egyptian basket
lying far beyond his reach
what was
Meanwhile, what is
the Chinese peasant
trying to do
in his story?
R
residing
near their summer resort
through
her entire year
after
their marriage, (for better or for worse)
russian
author catherine tries narrating
her
bearish story from their wintery perspective
where
her major concerns are perhaps
wrapping
gershwin's rhapsody
around
hieroglyphic spring sprouts
O
a rope loop propped up with hope
to lasso words running amuck
a mouth reshaped, repositioned
to pronounce the roundest vowel
W
pecking around a lion
only the little chick
knows the word's worth
as it writes the worlds' story
with its feet printed on the ground
rather than on a papyrus
Birds of Varied Feathers: A Confucian
Vision
Come, come
You peng from the Zhuangzian northern darkness
You swan from the Horacean meadows
You pheasant from under Li Bo’s cold moon
You oriole from Dufu’s green willow
You dove from the Dantean inferno
You phoenix from Shakespeare’s urn
You swallow from the Goethe oak or
The Nerudan dense blue air, you cuckoo
From the Wordsworthian vale, you albatross
From the Coleridgean fog, you nightingale
From the Keatsian plum tree, you skylark
Form the Shalleyean heaven, you owl
From under the Baudelairen overhanging years
You unnamed creature from the Pushkinian alien lands
You raven from near Poe’s chamber door
You parrot from the Tagorean topmost twig
And you crows from among my cawing words
Come, all of you, more than 100 kinds of
Birds from every time spot or spot moment
Come, with your light but strong skeletons
Come, with your hard but toothless beaks
Come, with your colored feathers, and flap your
wings
Against Su dongpo’s painting brush strokes
Come, all you free spirits of nature
Let’s join one another and flock together
High, higher up towards mabakoola
---------------------------------------------------
Meeting
Yesterday evening I
met an old friend
Of mine, while he
looked into my eyes
Without moving his
tiny pupils. I felt
His vision as sharp as
needles after several
Minutes, I left him without
saying a single
Word, he fled into
twilight, his shadow
Still as dark as sleek
as a bad omen
True Identities of Crows
You’re neither the
mystic
Prophet
Nor the common
Fortune teller
As some humans like to
believe
In the east or the
west
Rather, you are the
other selfhood of a fellow
Human, perching on the
treetop
Speechless, as if in
meditation over
Life, as if among dark
prayers
The Crow in the Snow
A baby crow
Just beginning to look
for
Food on its own
Pecking around
As quietly
As the snowfall itself
Perhaps to pin its
hope for spring
Or to measure the depth
Of winter
The only living
creature
Hatched out of white
Bold, palpable as in a
Chinese painting
Crows against the
Snowfall
Beyond the church
Close to the skyline
Several crows
And myriads of
snowflakes
Flapping together
Then flying, flying
The blackness of crows
Was engulfed by the
while
While the snow’s
whiteness
Becomes frozen
On the painting
