If you’re going through central Maine, looking for brown lakes, green mountains and muffin and seafood restaurants, you probably didn’t see the crows and their relationship with death ….
…he’s drunk and driving fast on snow and ice, and hits the tall pine: dead.
She carries on, dancing Friday nights.
…he’s cold even with mid-day summer fires, and dreams of women’s voluptuous and pulchritudinous shapes. His brother takes the land, bulldozes the slanted house, and the caregiver rifles his books, coins and tools.
…she looks up from the drugged men, and tells me that her husband got killed by a man they’d befriended, and then that man burned down their house.
She’s driving around with the drugged men, men who put up a model lighthouse and placed flags all around what was the home.
…and the old lobsterman and ship welder dies, so his friend, he with a new heart valve, gets the job of selling off the brown-stained tools and boxes and coins and frames of a century, aided by a cigarette-puffing provider with bad teeth and an angular body.
And those are but four scenes of the crows and death, and along a short stretch, with more deaths: chainsaws; cars; drownings; murders …but roads away ….
Those crows, so black, so still, so fast ….
Eugene “Gene” Novogrodsky, late summer 2011
Editor: The crows can get you in a nursing home too. After taking your feet from the insulin disease and ravaging your innards and your outards. Crime, hunger, disease, cops playing with their guns at their drunken parties, husband kills wife, wife does the same in return.
We may be some 3000? miles away from Maine, but in many a way we are the same.
But death may have a different flavor. I don’t think the Mainiacs (people from Maine, expressed with total affection) have for instance, many narco cremations, Monterrey Mexico style.
But there are many paths to the same exit.
