W&N watercolour on Amedeo 200gsm
Cape or Black Crow (Corvus capensis) – endemic to Africa
With thanks to John from
Midmarsh Jottings for the use of his beautiful photograph.
Crow wears a band of silver on his ankle, holds it out to watch it
glint in the sun like cool creek water. It is noon. He is the only one
out. All others have sought shelter under the canopy of live oak, the
leaves beneath the chaparral, Crow, the only one among them unafraid to
cast a shadow. He is a black body to absorb the sun’s heat, and yet
unheated.
He’s silver studded with stones, turquoise to match the cloudless
sky. He stretches out his leg again, watches sky and water glisten on
his ankle.
He flexes claws and brings his foot beneath him again, stretches out
his other, naked foot for balance.
His feet are beautiful, furrowed skin
like charcoal scales, sharp and onyx claws. As flexible as hands, good
for grasping new-hatched thrushes or pulling gate hooks from eye bolts,
and sleek. The humans see crow’s feet in the faces of their most
seasoned elders, the scars of a learned life spent laughing.
Crows’
feet, the mark of craft and cunning, crow’s feet a sense of humour made
skin and sinew.
He swings down on the branch, holds himself upside down and swinging,
the silver falling down around his upper leg
as he barks in delight.
Sky below his feet and swaying, silver pools above his head. The world
so beautifully inverted, he cannot keep from laughing. This is beauty:
the world turned upside down. You can keep your lithe ingénues, your
florid sunsets and cloying sentiment: beauty is all that cleft in two, a
cunning spark suspended by crow’s feet, a fall from a deadly height and
then the swoop of wing, the thickening of the air beneath splayed
feathers. Seeing air rising within air and climbing on it, sun glinting
blue-black as night sky off your feathers? Night colours blazing
brilliant from your feathers? Beauty is day turned to night and night to
day.
Heart beats furious beneath that dark breast, mind burns in onyx
eyes. Beauty a glint of laughter in a bottomless dark eye.
He barks
again.
Sun above live oak, a thousand suns refracted on the earth below.
Grasshoppers leap into the air clicking. Wild oats, tawn in the summer
heat, lean eastward with the breeze, and a wall of fog on the ocean
twenty miles west. All this beauty: all this.
Story from Coyote Crossing
.
