Reading Poetry to the Ravens

I am teaching my Raven Poe. She claws at the first line, arches her back,
gags on the word dreary, shrugs, then applauds herself.
Perhaps, I should’ve got a Crow

and hung lamented Hughe’s poems
on the clothes line: Tibetan prayer flags blessing the washing,
or a Jackdaw to recite an abridged version when it wasn’t dilly-dallying

with the lambs, hitchhiking on rams’ backs or stealing sleep from the ewe.
At night, I’m nauseous from poetry that bobs and sinks through hours:
it is a snake coiling around my arm, a brass thimble,

lines that swing back and forth as my feet scrape
the ground. The same image winks under the roundabout:
a key I miss each time I spin, until it blurs, then I am on the seesaw

bouncing out iambs, trochees. Next morning, the Ravens are gathered
in an unkindness: seven slanted ‘P’s on a white branch stuttering
the first letter of the thing I teach them.

Then my bird, loops the rhythm
from the tree, slides down the bank of the first stanza,
drops a small bone at my feet and repeats dreary, dreary.

Magnified, I’d see that the spines of her feathers and barbules
are made from the black lines of a thousand odes,
with each one inscribed for her.