Crow

The crow speaks directly into my ear as it goes soaring by.  

Me, perched on a rocky outcropping hundreds of feet above the canyon floor.  

The crow, traversing a paradox: hundreds of feet in the air yet also, for a moment, no more than an arm’s length away.  

Soon it’s but a speck, yet the walls of the rocky mounds on either side of the  wash trap its voice as if still drifts alongside me.  

Each of us has seen places the other has never seen, been places the other has  never been, the crow tells me. But the places known only to me are without a  doubt more mysterious, magnificent, remote, it confides with a final, intimate  croak as it vanishes from view.