There’s nothing left
in this frozen field.
Bent cornstalks in icy mud.
Nubs picked clean.
All vegetable matter
blanched to a ghostly white.
Clumped roots rotted
but holding on.
Hungry crows
have gathered here,
hundreds of them, at the field’s edge.
If approached, they will lift
but settle again,
always maintaining
some reasonable distance.
In thirty years,
I’ll be dead and forgotten.
Young crows
and old crows.
Michael Colonnese is the author of Sex and Death, I Suppose, which he describes as a hard-boiled detective novel with a soft Jungian underbelly, of a chapbook, Temporary Agency, and of a poetry collection, Double Feature. His short fiction, creative nonfiction, essays, and poems have appeared in over sixty literary magazines and academic journals, large and small. He’s a retired university professor, and for many decades he served as the managing editor of Longleaf Press at Methodist University, where he held an endowed chair in American Literature. He currently lives in the mountains of western North Carolina, near Asheville.
