The same cloth has lain for years over the table in the kitchen
where he sits in a white T-shirt, his chin greasy from gnawing 
the chicken crooked in the hollow between finger and thumb, bones
piled on a tin pie plate, light outdoors fading from yellow
to dark, the trees going black, wheeling crows 
blacker still, the beat and whir of black wing.

These days he sits at the table, listens for the sound of a wing
beating nearby, the birds perched in a maple outside the second floor kitchen
window, their beaks sometimes tapping at the pane, crows 
waiting for their meal, their own hunger gnawing 
a place under their sleek feathers, the morning a yellow
memory, the empty hollow of their bones

sounding a muffled note in his ears, sounding in his gnarled finger bones,
his hands gone numb now.  His arms pull up at the elbow, crook like the wing
of a bird.  He glances towards his wife's empty room, painted yellow 
just weeks before her death, the quiet of the neat kitchen
moving through the rooms, simple longing gnawing
a place under his ribs, where his heart beats strange beats.  He waits for the crows

to come and he feeds them on bread and chicken bones.  The crows
approach, tapping their beaks at the window, scenting chicken bones
and bread, scenting their own kin blood, green cloth over the table, a gnawing
at the mind of a man whose days have gone by, the days of slicked hair and fedoras, wing
tip shoes and a car, always a brand new car.  His mother cooked him pasta in the kitchen,
the house with a pear tree and a rose arbor and an exterior yellow.

His brothers went to war.  One returned whole but drunk, the other with one arm, the yellow
exterior and yellow kitchen the same, despite D-Day, despite rations and blackouts and crows
waiting on the tips of maple trees.  His mother cooked spaghetti with clam sauce in her kitchen
and he watched while her women friends, her commadres, ate it, their black dresses and bones
long ash now in the cemetery where his wife also lies, where a place awaits him, where a wing 
or a prayer or an angel wait to carry him, to free him from the waiting and the gnawing

of memory.  The sharp tapping of beaks starts the gnawing
again.  Shadows of feathers float across yellow
bedroom walls, over his face falls the shape of a ragged wing
quickly passing.  It's the sharp caw of crows
that startles him, the strange shape of old bones
piled on a plate on the green cloth in the kitchen.

At day's end the gnawing grows.  He waits for the crows
in silence at the table near the yellow bedroom.  He shifts the bones
while a swift wing sounds echoes through the house, on the walls, in the kitchen.