Crow in Variations by Diane Sahms 1. Voices Crow tells me it doesn’t know when God speaks but the voices it hears are the flavors of the rainbow & God’s voice would be February red, the taste of cherry-love. I press Crow, but Crow won’t answer then says, it was wrong about God’s voice being red & that it is zig-zagged, bright, silver light like a bolt of lightning in March’s sky to wake all the people still in hibernation. It is tasteless as water. 2. Reflection Crow flew into the room where Nietzsche died. Crow liked that he said, see the positive in the now & not to dwell in the past. Crow flew backward through this lifetime, through memory, shattering all its mirrors. Crow also flew back through countless other lifetimes. Crow landed and was clinging to the tightrope wire of this moment. With a tight grip balancing on the heavy windswept storm of the present, shining in its dark eyes were two mirrors or two black holes. —Crow couldn’t decide. 3. Blues Crow plays piano where it sweeps voices of blues, as musical notes into piles— the way one rakes dead leaves before jumping into them. Today, it stretches long notes across the keys, as if setting a table for all the outcasts whom have passed through the trembling reach of its talon tips. Crow cries as it strikes their bluest of blue notes. It sings as if God cared, as if listening. 4. Shapeshifter Crow’s clear silverish shrill drums each ear, making one attentive, captive of circling wings like words slicing through a futile existence entering into the closed-closet-space of sound. Trickster, shape shifts before taking flight. 5. Core Crow delves into deepest regions— clam shell of the hard soul— sharp beak of knowing cuts like a knife until it pries the soul open until a spirit rises. Then the voiced blue sky integrates light and shadow into new found flight. 6. Caws Sycamore as elder stands in bare-branched, dead space. Its inner heartwood shrinks daily into bark’s corpse. Fluttering wings of four crows like flying sets of human hands move as music notes to different octaves of tone-deaf-branches. Caws descend/ascend as shaman chants. This is mysterious, an ancient ritual. Sycamore waits on the future to call.
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Diane Sahms, a native Philadelphian, studies English translations of Chinese poetry. Author of seven poetry collections, most recently, Luna the lesser light, Moonstone Press, 2023 and City of Shadow & Light Philadelphia, 2022. Published in North American Review, Arlington Literary Journal, Northern Virginia Review, Philadelphia Inquirer, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Chiron Review, among others. She works full time for the government and is poetry editor at North of Oxford.
