The wound draws you back to the knife again and again. You try to get a grip on it but the wound slips away, drops into the grass, disappears among the roots. Next thing you know here’s our old friend the knife. You could go digging for the wound, but look how big the ground is. Instead bring some of your attention to the ground’s front door. Not too much, not to smother and overwhelm, just enough to fill a doll’s dish. Set it down and wait. Did you know that “to wait on” originally meant to love someone more than yourself? Feel how the center of gravity shifts away from you. The wound is mistrustful at first, which is how it’s survived on its own all these years. It suspects you of iodine, surgical thread, white pieces of gauze as if something shameful needed to be concealed from horrified gazes. Be patient. In time the wound may come to trust you, tell you its true history and goals, bring you news from the kingdom of wounds where everyone lives.

If a crow laughs over your house you will be favored by a cordial relationship with darkness and decay. Catastrophes are then cause for celebration, which most readily takes the form of a feast, because if you learn to eat misfortune you will never go hungry. The crow reminds us that all food is food whether fresh or long dead, crying in someone else’s nest for its own meal or wrapped in cellophane or heard at night when there’s no one there. He coaxes the snake’s tail into its mouth, knowing that it’s us we’re sick of, and we are the cure. He’s a single cinder blown into the eye of the sun. He consoles the inconsolable with a glass of grief, pointing out the bittersweet notes, the long slow finish with hints of the shortness of life. He seizes the pine tree by its tip and swings the world right way up again, so it’s once more underfoot. His laugh breaks stone. When light strikes him he opens wide and nothing is turned away, he isn’t a person but a place, not a place but a passage made of shoe polish and soot and one of the few reliable exits from the universe. Look into a crow and you can see nothing in all its finery at the other end. His preference though is for everything, and he stands at one of its corners holding it upright and steady. When the mood is on him it’s white and scatters blindness in all directions, as if all the giant lizards and fern forests in a piece of coal escaped at once.