“origin story, with crow”

—on the occasion of Earth Day 2023
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The crow’s wing is a blade
slicing the ocean open:
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inside, the usual offal—birds’ nests
of old transatlantic cable, fists of seagrass
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that clasp and conceal the bleached bones
of tankers and trawl nets, dusky shards of fallen stars
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set down on the seabed in a sunken syzygy
of celestial trash—a drowned, stationary orbit.
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Even deeper in abyssalpelagic space, a forest
of grey spruce slow-dances
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in the dark undercurrent, like phosphenes
forged by the pressure of water and salt.
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The crow plucks one, squirrels it in her plumage
and soars—for a moment spruce and crow and sea and sky
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concatenate, which is to say create,
a new cosmos in the ink of her wing,
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connecting the drowned
to what cannot be drowned.
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She returns the spruce to drier ground, from its boughs
watches fishermen gadding about the bright, boatless harbour,
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gathering bait and gossip, mending generations
of decay in their nets,
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listens to them quiz one another about traps and tides,
the topography of a good trawl line, the boundaries
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of inherited territories and the brisk profits
to which they’ll one day return—
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as if returning
is something that will always happen,
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as if there were a net wide enough
to reel back in the world.