Poem of the Week | January 15, 2024

This week’s Poem of the Week is “Ravens Flying” by Kai Carlson-Wee.

Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of RAIL (BOA Editions, 2018). He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and his work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, and AGNI. He currently lives in San Francisco and is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.

Ravens Flying

I climb the hill to watch the glassy walls
of San Francisco glow, to hear the distant
moan of ships. To see the fog, the floating
fog that pushes clearly through the eye.
A pair of ravens turning slowly in the frame.
I think of hiking up the Bitter Root in rain.
The day you called me from the waiting room
to tell me it was done. The night we kissed
at the train station depot in St. Paul, pressing
a cigarette into your skin. The love I felt
then, wave-like, breaking a hole in my chest
like a shotgun fired through drywall. The same
red impressionistic tones I tell my students
not to use. The scar on your hand and
the effort it takes to write even one honest
word. The light goes out, the light goes in.
The ravens hold the sky. And no matter what
they say about changing your life, getting over
it quickly, becoming stone, becoming the long
branch with new blossoms turning, loving
leaves a darkness on the mind. We are not
meant to go back in time, to return to the wound
forever. We are meant to climb the hill alone,
to love what it was with a faith in wind
and a failed attempt to describe it. We start
where we are, and when the feeling fades we turn
the poem, not toward the birds, the image
of black wings, but toward the unpredictable
way they dive, in unison, toward the ground.

Author’s Note

I wrote this poem during the height of quarantine when the world seemed frozen in time. Human touch was considered toxic. Narratives didn’t make sense. The only thing offering me solace was going on long walks, feeling wind on my face, watching birds float above the city. “Ravens Flying” is a Romantic poem, but also a poem about the failure of language to express our deepest emotions. In the book Camera Lucida, the critic Roland Barthes uses the term punctum to describe a potent image, meaning, its ability to pierce or wound the viewer. I was reacting against this idea, moving away from the “death” we find in images and toward an emergent moment of change. The poem fails in its language but follows Nature toward a more visceral conclusion, ending, not in the realm of art, but in action and transformation.