"The Crows At 3 a.m."

by Stanley Plumly

The politically correct, perfect snow of Vermont

undulant under the lightly bruised, moonlit-backed-

becoming-storm-clouds slowing then speeding just above

the line of blue spruce on Mt. Mansfield here in

what I’m told is the state’s “cloudiest county,”

vaguely an analogy for the plate tectonics of the blankets

constantly shifting from the left to the right side

of my body, pulling the heart, until by dawn I’m holding on,

waking with the cold, somehow looking at my hands

that, in the pearl dark, look like the first fall castings

of the sycamore, those pocked dry leaves

that were my mother’s final hands: sallow

dying coloring, mapping liverspots, rootlike

veining texturing the underdermal surfaces. The test,

 

writes Fitzgerald, in an essay called “The Crack-Up,”

of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold

opposing ideas in the mind at the same time yet retain

the ability to function. He couldn’t, he says, so he cracked

like a plate. He is trying to update Keats’s

notion of “Negative Capability, that is

when a man is capable of being in uncertainties,

Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact

& reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go

by a fine isolated verisimilitude

caught from the Penetralium of mystery,

from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.”

When I heard the crows, like raven-geese, rending the dark,

filling the falling snow with wings,

                                                            I thought, for a moment,

they were speaking or singing.

Crows at the hour—Fitzgerald again—of the dark night

of the soul, Poe-like crows chasing back and forth

in a quandary or a quarrel, up and down the Gihon.

Then they disappeared, let me drift back into sleep

to find my hands holding my mother’s hands as if to help her

rise from the cold dead dream light of Vermont.

Stevens’s some twenty blackbirds differ only in their scale:

the beauty of inflections and innuendos,

shadows passing out of hearing, out of sight,

but no less present in the settled order. Thus the river’s moving,

the blackbird must be flying, two half-knowledges

or halves of one knowing. Those who love us who now live

in the air live in a loneliness we sometimes imagine.