In the valley of the Adirondacks, where the snow

 melts and pools like pond water and streams of ice 

flurry down into the black parking lots and deep sullen 

potholes, and the smell of salt comes not from the 

ocean smothering the shore, but from the diesel trucks 

preparing for another carpeting from winter.

The grackles fly in between the branches which 

begin to open their green eyes as the sun kisses them awake. 

The black birds whistle and sing their gravely shrieks as 

the mountains choose to breathe and be green again.

You watch these birds as you wait for the bus, 

your black skin shining like the black feathers of the grackles, 

a colorless thing that somehow reflects all the colors of 

the chromatic universe entombed by the blackness of feathers. 

You can’t sit still in class, to go to school is to thrawl in 

restlessness, to live awake in a coffin six feet beneath the ground. 

I watch you wriggle as the usual voices you hear are scathing, 

are words of clenched hands, white knuckles 

pleading that you restrain all the life ebbing from you. 

Your eyes stare at the grackles flying in their shining flocks. 

I ask you your name and you say it as though it is a book you 

one day intend to read. I try to teach you, my white skin screaming,

about how uncomfortable it is to live in this country blooming hate 

still exhales its chemicals, a scentless poison that’s 

too deeply in our nail beds―gripped to the sacs of our lungs―to let go. 

You shrug at me with unknowing defenses, guards that have helped 

you in the past, which help you now as your friend and classmate 

makes a comment about the nearby inner city and the damned people that live there.

You’d rather watch the snow melt into its streams. 

I’d rather watch them too, as bells ring like trumpets of 

angels saving you from the death-thought of paralysis, from the 

thoughts I try to teach you about in History―to think about the decay 

which never ends as the four horsemen circle you. Is it that the 

world is too heavy for you to try to lift? Or is it that the air is 

too dense that to flap your wings would take away the shine that you have left? 

I hear the bells usher you away into the hallways, where you 

might try to sing like the grackles outside, where no words 

you hear from a teacher like me can really connect you with that world 

outside and its potholes and snowmelt and salt collecting up like great 

white walls which cast tall shadows, a blackness that you can’t see through. 

I want you to know, you are the grackle too, it lives in you, 

as you open your eyes in this small valley of the mountains, 

the trees open their eyes, and the grackle’s darkness

contains all the colors of the universe―we can see them. 

The grackle sings for you, in its sharp, quiet way.