the cawing of the crows is latent
— Ship of Gold by Emile Nelligan (56)

The Sun has set but the horizon still glows.
A bat flies, traces irregular polygons,
since the vortices of birdsong were silenced.
A nesting crow opens her eye in the gloaming.
She says nothing. Her philosophizing is her own
until dawn, and even then, it will be sparse.
The bat flies high over roads and low through trees.
The crow’s oviparous vocabulary for bats
is rarely shared in their mammalian company.
Corvid and chiroptera cast their spells
where they glide. They imbricate netherworlds,
the same netherworlds, but from different schools of magic.
Crows cast by sight, bats by sound.
We know they seldom converse
because the crow is silent in the between-time
bailiwick of bats. We do not know why.

[Pushcart Prize nominee, researcher & farmer Terry Trowbridge’s poems are in Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Carousel, Lascaux Review, Kolkata Arts, Leere Mitte, untethered, Snakeskin Poetry, Progenitor, Miracle Monocle, Orbis, Pinhole, Big Windows, Muleskinner, Brittle Star, Mathematical Intelligencer, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, New Note, Hearth and Coffin, Synchronized Chaos, Indian Periodical, Delta Poetry Review, Literary Veganism and ~100 more. His lit crit is in BeZine, Erato, Amsterdam Review, Ariel, British Columbia Review, Hamilton Arts & Letters, Episteme, Studies in Social Justice, Rampike, Seeds, and The /t3mz/ Review.  His Erdösnumber is 5. Terry is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for his first writing grant. ]