what makes it hard to catch is how they time their trips to the tree; they choose the most October night, whatever the month may be. it’s the one with lazy hazes, with a moon half-hidden and high, with winds unsteadily whispering phrases–fragments in a scattered sky. it’s the night when stray cats are better called feral, when children and dogs are fretful, when the lonely go wandering alone at their peril, and the raging become the regretful. (in the cities this night sometimes slips by, unseen, but the attentive sense it even there, even in the short nights of July—a subtle scent of iron in the air.)
you will not hear them hover in and land; serration keeps them silent in their flight. you will not see their shapes from where you stand; in this dim and dapple they are shaded from your sight. so if you find their tree, somehow, by day—you’ll know it by the foreign fruits littered all around its roots, those pallid pellets full of feathers and bones—come back by night, stand far enough away, and listen for the quiet creak of branches burdened in their sway, a shift in the whistle of the air through the boughs: away from whispers, closer toward moans. (don’t imagine they won’t know your presence; realize, instead, they will not care.)
you’ll hear them when they call their roll, hear each envoy sign their singing scroll: the saw-whet and sooty and screeching, the scarred; the masked and the maned, the burrowing and barred; the long-whiskered and laughing, the crested and craven; the tawny and tawdry (those taunters of ravens); the fearful and fulvous and earless, the elder and elven and fearless; the ash-faced, the bay, the rufous, the ruffled; the bright, and the great northern grey.
each will report and opine, and sometimes they’ll squabble—you’ll hear how this is no mere squawking; the timbre and texture and tone are those of tempered talking. their convocation comes around, as always, to the course of more conspicuous events; at this congress are decided all contingencies of constant consequence, for these far-sighted sages have long practice in the art of chance-become-change, and if their parliaments were pages, the story would seem (to us) surpassing strange.
but i wonder, will you surmise the sense of their speeches in this session—or will you only hear a single echoed question? they’ve learned, after ages spent as agents of the dead: less meaning’s in a word than all the ways in which it’s said. so if you say their words are only one, i’ll find you false by way of tepid true.
“who?” they reply and repeat and remind. “who, who, who.”