`A Stiff Turn-the-Eye-Inward Old Man'

One night last week on the way home from work I stopped at the branch library near our house to pick up the books I had reserved. The branch closes at 6 p.m., and I made it with a few minutes to spare. Among the titles I claimed was Planet Earth: Poems New and Selected, by the Canadian poet P.K. Page. The volume is edited by Eric Ormsby, who in his foreword ranks Page higher than Elizabeth Bishop. That’s part of the reason I wanted to reread Page’s poems. I respect Ormsby’s judgments and it bothers me that I’ve found so little to engage me in Page’s work. What am I missing?

I chatted with a librarian and she was shutting off the lights when I stepped outside. Sunset is around 5:50 p.m. The west glowed pale yellow and my car and those around it and much of the surrounding blacktop were covered with a boisterous, just-arrived convention of crows, my favorite bird. Crows gather in roosts at sunset. Explanations are various, including protection in numbers and exchanging food-foraging information. I thought of this one as an especially noisy cocktail party. The birds weren’t planning to sleep on my Oldsmobile; merely chat, as I had with the librarian, before settling in for the night. There were hundreds of crows in the parking lot and perched on nearby roofs and power lines. The best count I could make of birds on my car was 27. I had to count fast because other library patrons were complaining about the noise and the presumed befoulment of their cars. I looked and found no shit on mine. The crows grudgingly flew from my car and I thought of the playground scene in Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Later that night I settled in, as I presumed the crows had, and opened Page’s book at random to page 50, where I found “The Crow”:

“By the wave rising, by the wave breaking
high to low;
by the wave riding the air, sweeping the high air low
in a white foam, in a suds,
there
like a churchwarden, like a stiff
turn-the-eye-inward old man
in a cutaway, in the mist
stands
the crow.”

Some people get all cosmic about such coincidences. I draw no conclusions and try to enjoy them as life’s little gifts of enhancement. First, I had the book; then, the crows; then, the convergence of crows and poem. Thanks.