Saturday Crow Night
Saturday Crow Night
The canal holds its breath like a man who has already said too much.
Concrete throat.
Gate locked in the absence.
A geometry built for movement now rehearsing stillness.
On the berm, the crow does not
hurry. It never does. It walks the edge like it owns it. Its coat gathers the west into itself, black turning copper, copper turning bruise, bruise turning a quiet fire that refuses to call itself beautiful. The light does not rest on the bird. The bird takes it. Processes it. Returns it altered.
Behind it, the cotton comes up obedient. Rows of green repeating the sentence the valley wants to hear: growth, yield, promise, season. The field believes in continuity because it must. The seed does not argue with the calendar. The plant does not ask who owns the water that did not arrive.
This is the part nobody records.
The canal remembers flow in its bones. Faint silt lines confess where water once stood, where it turned, where it left faster than the men who depended on it. Infrastructure does not forget. It is reassigned to silence.
The crow pauses at the head gate and looks down into the dry mouth.
Inspection.
Not curiosity.
It knows something about absence that men keep trying to regulate into presence. It knows the difference between a system that sleeps and one that has already chosen not to wake.
West light climbs its wing. Each feather holds an entry of the day. Diesel drift. Dust lift. The long arithmetic of labor turning soil into something the market will recognize as necessary and forgettable. The crow stands inside that equation and refuses to resolve.
Somewhere upstream, decisions were made with clean hands and indoor voices. Allocations. Priorities. Rights written in language that does not carry dust. The canal receives the consequence without commentary. This is its function now. To hold nothing and call it order.
The cotton keeps greening.
That is the cruelty.
Life proceeding as if absence is temporary. As if the schedule will correct itself. As if the next release will come in time. The roots already know it is late.
The crow turns its head once, listening for a sound that does not travel anymore.
No water.
No rush.
No argument.
Only wind against dry walls and the low hum of distance.
Night begins before the sun admits it. The west bleeds into the bird and the bird carries it forward. A moving shadow holding the last account of light.
The canal says nothing.
The field says everything.
Neither one is believed.
Closing Haiku:
last light in black wings
dry canal keeps its regret
night enters the rows
