The crows keep a directional faith, always turned away from night. I watch them push into the dawn, shedding their atmospheric cloak before it has a chance to fade. The air fills with the vagrant chirps of birds in a chaos of vectors, the cradle song of a mourning dove, and the cuckoo of a stoplight calling out against catastrophe.

From your voice trails a hush that I fill with memory of the song’s imprint. It begins to decay the way anything we touch again and again yields to our caress.

This is my directional faith– to wear at the song until it is only breath and, within that breath, find that the whole of the rhythm remains.

Together we lap against the world.

A crow works in layers under a buttery cloud, dropping a peanut beneath the banana tree, an echo of night building the day.