In November
by Eamon Grennan
Black—the cracked hilarity of crows. Jagged black laughter over your head. Bodies in their
fit of being: one couple jostling for a branch, another pair preening each other’s feathers. Down here you’re feeling
the sheer quiet that settles on the body after body-work—digging a ditch, cutting back hedges, raking the last of the
leaves onto a blue tarpaulin. Load after load you lay in a mulch-line along the fence, packing a trench, tamping it
down, letting scents of autumn have a last fling with your nose and mouth. When you’ve put the rake away, the
crackling sheet of plastic neatly folded, and you walk under bare trees where crows are cackling, coughing, rattling
branches, it’s good to feel your body as only an over-floating sense of satisfaction, mind buried in its warm earth,
in a quiet that’s flesh, that’s spirit, that’s what a crow might feel for a minute or so in sunshine—belly full,
perching a chimneypot, out of danger—or what you’d find among the small stones and yew bushes of a well-tended
cemetery, or in an old dog spread in dreamless sleep, or in any settled something that’s hardly breathing, just
feeling body-heat hold itself easy in the last hours before the first snow.
Copyright © 2010 by Eamon Grennan.