Down by the river the crows are calling in the cold.
Some have a metallic sound like a clang,
Others sound pinched as if the call
Is squeezed out from inside, like paste,
And spewing the last dab that is in them.

Just now I hear a sound that jerks me around,
The hairs stand spike upright on my neck.
It is the sound of a boy calling out, Ahhh!.
The voice vibrates as if running downhill,
And the sound bounds out of him that way,
Every thump a reverberating Ah!
I expect to see him waving a mitten
From the knoll across the marsh.

But it is a crow, perched low in a maple.
It dips its beak, and calls again Ah!
And for a moment I believe the crow and boy are one,
And the crow is saying, I saw it all,
And I alone survived to tell.

A boy of eleven, bursting from a screen door
And running to a field, past the creek that runs
Through there, and stomping wet footed through familiar places,
A journey that ends in a sack in the dark
in the trunk of a car in the bearded black spruce.

But when the man opens the lid the bag is empty
And the boy is gone, he was ushered away,
Installed alive in the topmost branches.
When people cluster like clucks at the scene
the black angels circling above mock their sorrow --
Why seek him here, the boy is flown.

And the eyes that adored every wild thing
Are different now, they do not blink,
The mouth never yawns, the limbs do not
Stretch out in bed at night like a song of skin
And humming blood and growing bone.

He who begged to be set loose was.
And now it is he who alights on the highway at dawn,
Stripping muscle from the runover body.
The other birds bray
About shiny tidbits fetched in the light of day,
They thrive like men on predictable dreams.

But behind the dull black bead of eye
Is a boy who knew darkness deeper than a well,
And cold more pitiless than snow,
Who knows the heart endures
What winter cannot kill,
And blinks.