Listening.

LESSONS from the FUNERAL of a RAVEN

I've been translating the language with which creatures address God, including the non-harmonic bleats of dying sheep, the burpish fish, the tenor grown of the toad in the snake's mouth, the croak of the seagull flopping on the yellow line, misnamed mockingbird, and cat bird singing hundreds of borrowed songs -- coyotes joyous yipe when they bring down a fawn which honks like a bicycle horn for its helpless mother. The ladybug on the table was finally still.  I strained my ear close to her during the final moments, but only heard Mozart from the other room.  She was beyond reach one night under a big moon.  I heard the massive lung scream of a horse pounding the pasture across the creek, then his breathing above the creek.  This language is closer to what we spoke in Africa 70,000 years ago before we started writing things down and now we can't seem to stop.  I can't imagine how thought we though that we're better than the any of these other creatures, but that we wrote ourselves into it.  Someone looked down from Babel's tower and got the wrong idea, ignoring the birds above him.  I learned all of this one day listening to a raven funeral and a fir tree behind my cabin and learned it again listening to a wolf howling from the river delta nearby.  It's an old secret past anyone's caring, or so it seems.

Jim Harrison