He tried to console me, suggesting that perhaps it tried to fly too soon. As if there is comfort there. There is not, because I was suggesting they should have flown already. But I was wrong. This was proof that I was wrong: if they were ready to leave, to fly, this would not have looked like a ghost-deer, a cow fetus; it would not have been naked against cement—perhaps against cement, still, but not with bare flesh.

  The fact is that this fledgling—this attempted fledgling—was incomplete. It had not a single feather, just that wrinkled thin transparent and blue flesh covering hollow bones and barely covering veins and intestines, the dark gray-blue of eyeballs behind unopened lids. And there is something fascinating about being able to see inside of ourselves, isn’t there. To be able to count our veins, locate our heart, try to map intestines. It is mesmerizing to unnecessarily make sure that we are whole and complete—the relief to find we have ten fingers and ten toes and only two eyes, only one nose and let us count our teeth—but we can lose these and lack these and replace these or not without being incomplete, as they exist within a range. Like bones.

  I knew that what he said was not the case: we do not attempt flight until after we have the wings and muscles, until after we coat ourselves with molasses and shower ourselves with down.

  Carrion

  It is raven season again. I have felt cold, and I have felt lonely. I have been lazy, and I have been thinking about ambitions, love, travel, and how the body clings to another season. I have been wondering if we could ever have the power to say no to something, ever have the foresight to deny the next thing; if we ever have the agency to remove ourselves from the serial. Of course we cannot skip a season, but we might not embrace it as ardently, knowing that eventually, in the cycle, we would come across something that we do like and wish to embrace.

  But. One part of me assumes today will be just like yesterday, and the other part of me accepts each day and each season as its own: I cannot hold out for fall, because it is summer, and I have to live through it; I should not wish today is warm just because yesterday was cold, because today is cold, and no wishing, no anticipating will change that. I am singular and constantly in a single moment, assuming winter will last forever, as will spring and summer and fall. But seasons do not last.

  Ravens like the disinterring and the melting and that perception of new. They like the new warmth and ruffle against the new cold. They do not migrate but, rather, tolerate the change. This is their home, so they stay, and they wait.

  Of course, there are no ravens here. The large black birds roosting in the bare tree outside my window are not ravens. But I will always call these days of melting snow coming twice every year—during warm early-winter days and again at the advent of spring—raven season: there is poetry there that does not exist in referring to it as crow season or the weather pattern marked by my noticing the crows outside my window.

  It’s just this: I am confused at the same time as the weather seems to be, which happens to be the same time that I notice them. I create the term raven season, because I try to convince myself that everyone is confused, not just me. And this is only indicative of my current depression: raven season is chemical, circumstantial, and biological. It is a way to provide patch or ointment, to stop the itch, the watering eyes.

  A dream I had only last night helped me realize that raven season is related not to weather but to unrest, uncertainty and questioning, exploration, and desiring simple, uninhibited truths (each raven, all confusion, I thought, would have disappeared had I simply heard I love you or yes or forever—or I don’t or no or never):

  They are many, and they are intolerably close to me. They are threatening. I am trying to move past their barricade. I feel the cool oily edge of their beaks snapping at my fingers and ears, and I use my broader palms to spread their darkened, violent maxillary and mandibular rostrums, those well-formed growths of keratin. I am afraid they are going to begin cawing in my ear, deafening me. I am trying to hold them away. I do not want to be confused, I do not want to wait for answers. I want to be beyond transition.

  These bouts of confusion and dislodgement, of excess desiring—which is also to say ravens and this season I have come to describe as theirs—have always reminded me of raccoons with their greasy palms and arched backs, their black eyes, their sexual noises and posturing, ducking between trashcans after breakups at night; of the hunting I have done, the quarry-chasing and quarry-digging; of a youth spent drinking vodka out of plastic cups and staying up until it is too cold to go outside, but going out anyway to smoke; of pounds of books I love the most and carry with me; of suicide attempts; and of the sudden longing I sometimes experience for Rust Belt cities slowly ascending mountainsides or the clear-skyed-snowing of Utah.

  But this would make more sense: carrion, fruit pressed between fingers, against palm and against hardwood flooring, excrement, death. The season delivers ghosts to the forefront of my consciousness: after things are hidden, even with the lightest of coverings of transitional snows, or the lifting of such a veil, I am given something seemingly new, a way to start again on those things I have fucked up, or a way to abandon them for something new. To begin again is a blessing and a horror: you start over with the same questions and fears as before, you again travel through a narrow battlefield with scavengers who beg for the dead. The snow and ice always melt, and not only do the birds come to eat those things that have suffocated and been pressed under the weight of the cold but also the memories of those dead are raised as ghosts, definitely there but with infinitely less substance. Things melt, things change, there is transition, and I remember. And for a while, until the heat or cold has set in for the following months, until the depression lifts, until I am no longer scared to be bitten by large horrible dream-ravens. I have to live alongside them. I have to live alongside not knowing what I can say when, not knowing who is when, not knowing.

  There are two ravens always with Odin, except at dawn, when Huginn and Muninn fly from his shoulders, spread their greasy wings against the wind, and circle themselves effortlessly around the world. It is only then, maybe, that he questions, that he is uncertain, anticipating either abandonment or absolute devotion.

  But by breakfast, both return to his shoulders and whisper to him all the information they gathered in their travels. Odin is blind, but he sees through his ravens, through Huginn and Muninn, whose names translate to Thought and Memory. Because he is blind—or because he is missing an eye—he is dependent on them to see anything, to see the world, to see everything. At all.

  They are free to fly, and so why should they return. He owns them, and they are obligated to, I suppose; but is their loyalty purely mythological, metaphysical. Do they stay only because Odin is a god and has power over them. If they could choose differently, would they. If Odin were less respectable, like Thor or Zeus even, would they risk punishment or dis-existence not to return, to be free of him and perhaps each other. Is it fear.

  Fear could keep them: fear of dis-existence, of sudden unmateriality. Fear of anger and potential punishment. Fear of not knowing what else to do, what else they could do. Fear of not knowing who or what they are without him. Fear that they only are with him.

  These two birds have been on my mind for years. They were the first I knew of ravens, and, because we so often evaluate new experiences based on what we know of old experiences—how significant others are always better or worse than, we know how a person will treat us because we expect to be treated similarly by similar people—and because the mythology functions as a series of metaphors, the constitution of all ravens I have experienced has been affected: they always whisper to the blind, describe the world for those who cannot see. Ravens are always thought, and they are always memory: they exist on shoulders, snapping beaks near ears.

  I call crows ravens, because I want ravens. And because no black corvids are so dissimilar from each other. I want the world imagined for me. I want it determined for me, made predictable and described for me, definitively, without doubt. I want full and complete trust. And loyalty. So I make it up: they are saying something, and I really want to know what; I want to know to what they think I am blind. I want to understand my own metaphor.

  I don’t even actually know that Odin is blind. What I do know, as much as one can know a myth, is that he only has one eye, that he placed the other in Mimir for a drink of its wisdom-filled water at the roots of the world tree. Missing an eye does not mean blindness, though; and, having drunk from that water, he should know everything already and need neither Huginn nor Muninn. Odin should not need his ravens to see for him.

  They aren’t said to help him travel, do not seem to direct him as if he were blind like a dog. Perhaps they are interpreting what is in front of him. Of course, there is the possibility that ravens are such good communicators and he is so attuned to them that there is the illusion of not being blind despite being so—blinded from another story, not from having placed an eye in a well. But Odin is not omnipresent; neither are they, but they are two, and they can fly, and they travel more quickly. In this sense, Huginn and Muninn are not responsible for telling him everything (or anything) but merely for describing what is happening outside of his knowledge of everything, about the changing things.

  This is what ravens are. They are two; they are depth perception. They are eyes, and they are braille.

  They are carrion-feeders—they live off the dead. And Huginn and Muninn are ghosts, and ghosts were only once alive. And Odin hanged himself from Yggdrasil. And Yggdrasil is ash. And ash meant spear, and Odin used his to pierce himself in the side when he hanged from the tree. And ash is to ash, I hear. And ash is the product of conflagration—and it all simply points toward death, toward dying, that thing we, as a culture, already know about ravens.

  But this feels too simple for me: these ravens are mine, and they should not have to mean what everyone seems to think they mean. Huginn and Muninn may be symbols, but the ravens outside my window are mine. I have known them as death-messengers for too long. Ravens are more than birds of blood, or they should be. Somehow. They are indexes of crumbling and of change.

  I can make them more than this too.

  Ravens can be metaphors for anything: I graft my own meaning to them, stitching what I think I need to them so that when I see them, they return that thing to me. They are I love you and they are I never have and never will and always and stay and move in and yes and now and don’t you see and—. But, ultimately, my ravens are certainly not here to tell me of my mortality, because that is not only simple but also inefficient: I take a pill every day that tells me I am mortal, and I have a tattoo—which I know I have every day, though I do not necessarily see it—which verbally indicates the glory of my being here. Ravens are something else, because I do not need them to be that.

  (Freud: my certainty here may only indicate that that is exactly what they are. I have no choice but to admit that possibility. In a way, in one way, they are still death, dying, my mortality. But death is not so different from change, and dying is not so different from transition, and how often are we burned after death. So I admit the possibility. And I continue to negate. Because I want them to be signs of definitive answers.)

  I watch recordings of and read texts about object-retrieval tests. I am panicked by non-humans possessing logic and reason and meta-tool-use so similar to and perhaps surpassing us and ours. The large black bird hops and slides across a metal table and picks up a thin brown stick between rostrums; it uses this stick to pull a longer stick to the front of a barred box with quick, rickety, ticking head movements that seem so deft; it drops the short stick and inserts its pointed, dynamic keratin protrusion between the bars to retrieve the previously inaccessible longer stick, then hops and slides over to yet another box and uses this stick to pull the food within reach. Then snaps it up, disappearing in its violent maw.

  I have seen this so many times, with different birds, in different locations, each with a slight variation. I watch their bodies, count their toes, try to distinguish single feathers from the flat black robes that cover them, but my fascination is with how their bodies enact what I perceive to be their thought, how a body itself is merely a tool; I pause the videos at the moment just after the bird realizes it cannot reach the food with only its beak. Pause again when, I presume, its eye lands on the first stick. There is a head-tilt or a turn of the head to focus another eye on the same thing or to look at something else or see more. I try to look beyond the cornea for thought, to understand what is happening in that small brain.

  Birds adapt. Birds learn. They learn rush hour, learn traffic patterns determined by stoplights, learn how frequently trash day comes. They are not completely reactionary, the way we often think of animals; these birds predict: weather, dangers.

  Corvids recognize and remember faces and schedules. (I wish I could see them seeing me.) This is comforting—something (some things) knows me and can show me aspects of myself that I did not see; some things (something) know others and can tell me things about them that I do not know, cannot see. They travel and report. Whisper in my ear. They travel, observe, learn, recognize, then return to me.

  Ancestors taught their young to recognize faces, communicate descriptions of them. They pass knowledge of any physical thing, anything that can be described, through their generations. Crows, like rooks, are avid storytellers—but, unlike how it is for rooks, who kill each other over bad stories, for crows, there is no such thing. All stories are valuable. So I wonder if this is what they are trying to tell me, to teach me—if I am like one of their young, and they are telling me with their quiet, soothing familial dialect (it sounds so much like cooing) who is going to hurt me or break me or feed me or kill me, if they are trying to tell me how to pass all my knowledge on to the young I do not possess. Or if instead they recognize something in my face, if I am food or danger to them, if I possess one of those faces about which their young are told.

  I look at them, because I want to see them recognizing me, remembering, though we are not recognized as much as differentiated from or compared to.

  But really, when I think about what ravens see in my face, I am wondering if I look like Odin. If corvids are able to pass such information through generations, then certainly the ones I see would remember or still see Odin’s one eye, his hood or hat or staff, his reddened restricted neck; they would remember or still feel the bulk or slightness of his shoulders through the leather he wore. Perhaps he perpetually had stubble on his cheeks, the way I do; perhaps they understand these things over my eyes to be proof of blindness; perhaps his and my skin tones are identical, and we are the same height and have the same narrow gait, the same cat’s eye ring on right middle finger.

  There must be something about me that registers as Odin to them, as they are following me and trying to tell me something—or perhaps not something as much as everything. But they aren’t telling me anything, as they are not speaking to me; rather, I know I am making them, and myself, into something we are not. I am making myself a god so that I feel important, making myself a god with thought and memory as messengers, so that I have companions because I feel alone. So that I feel certain, because I am confused.

  Carrion

  I have come to the realization that they are of course. And I hate that idiom—of course. I do not often hear it used in any sense but to assert that something should not be argued. It is used as validation. Something is of the ordinary course of events. That is, they are predictable in navigation. This course, this track, this race. They are more predictably here than there, here than elsewhere. To say they are of course suggests only that they exist, that, in life, in the world, of course I would happen upon them. This is possibility, not probability, though. They actually are not of course, not here. They actually do not exist here. They could. It is possible. So my saying that they are, for me, of course, is problematic.

  Ravens exist.

  Of course.

  But course is also agreement (not entirely different): to say something is of course is not only to say that the something is inarguable but also that you agree, that you are of the same opinion, are looking at the same evidence and drawing the same conclusion. Of course ravens exist. Ravens exist, of course. And course is many things. To course is to hunt, chase, pursue; it is to run through; it is, in a way, to look for.

  But to then say that ravens are of course in one sense becomes a lie: I don’t course ravens; I happen upon them. There is something fleeting in the idiom, too, which I like: as we stumble upon them, they are running through billions of lives, to make their appearance. They are daily traversing the globe. We never see them for long. They are looking for newly dried land, and they are gathering all information.

  It was strange to see them both at the same time—both ravens, the two that make quick stops everywhere before going everywhere else, strange that they traveled together this time. Of course, it is only strange because they have never looked as if a vast net had been cast up into the air; which, after a few moments would sink slowly down upon the trees until every twig seemed to have a knot at the end of it. Instead, two seems to be the number. The maximum. The exception, really. Most often, one, solitary.

  He and I were talking on the back stairs when I noticed them. They were on the chimney of the building across the alley and to our right, a floor and a roof and a chimney’s height above where we were sitting. I noticed them, saw them, looked at. I watched as they flew in together and buffeted their wings against the wind only once before landing. Because they were not there before, because we did not stumble upon them, and because they stopped within eyesight, it was like a visitation. And I thought, of course.

  Of course I would notice them, and of course he would not; of course when I heard the sound of their wings slicing the ridges and ripples and roughness of the air, I was able to identify them, without seeing them (because they are predictable); of course there were two. And of course they were private, for he did not ask me what had taken my attention away from him, if only briefly (if only visually). That may be because we were arguing, were angry and yelling and I probably had tears welling up and my looking away from him would be expected. Of course. It is hard to look at him when he makes me cry.

 

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