The Crow Situation

October 31st. There is a crow on the fire escape. Has been for, I just checked, eleven minutes. I noticed him while I was waiting for the kettle and I have not moved from this spot at the window since, which tells you something about the morning I was apparently going to have regardless of my plans for it.

He is not doing anything. That is the thing about crows. They are extraordinarily good at simply being somewhere, with full commitment, in a way that makes you feel like you are the one intruding on a situation that was already underway. He has looked at me twice. Both times it felt like he was deciding something. I don't know what he decided.

Eleven minutes. He did not blink first.

I keep thinking about the prints still leaning against the kitchen wall behind me, and the windowsill arrangement in front of me, and this bird on the railing between the two, and how the whole kitchen has turned into a kind of inventory this fall, one thing after another holding still in low October light while I look at it. The crow fits. He really does fit.

The windowsill has witnesses now.

He left after fourteen minutes. Just lifted off without any fuss, gone over the roofline. I stood there another minute anyway. Happy Halloween, I guess. Whatever that means to a crow.