Left Hanging
- Robin Woolman
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
A poem by Robin Woolman
I am walking on a cracked path
by a winter-ragged river.
My friend walks in step beside me—
peripheral comfort.
I have lost my spouse
not to logical death,
but to a warp in his desire,
maybe an aging ego
getting its first whiff of mortality.
“He notices my smell,”
I tell my friend, hoping she
can help crack this new clue
to his dissolution.
“He never noticed my smell before.”
I have been thinking a lot about
animal matrimony—those species
who mate and mourn a life companion.
I have acted the animal lately
prowling and mewling, guttural wails,
beating the bedroom walls.
“He’ll come around,” my friend assures,
“And in the meantime—”
“Ha, the Mean Time, sure is.”
I laugh, taking in the brown river.
It constricts in so many complicated eddies.
“Just hang in there,” she says.
The trees ahead are suddenly alive and raucous
with black agitated wings and beaks.
“Those crows are mobbing.”
We look for some raptor
hunkered against their banter.
Instead, in a naked ash tree,
a lone crow is hanging by one wing.
I make out the fishing line strung between
branches. It is noosed around the tip of the crow’s
right pinion and she dangles,
left wing beating, claws curling and uncurling—
skinny fists against the indignity of being
hung out like washing. A chorus of her sisters
jockey and rail, whether loyal or critical,
I cannot tell, while witnessing gulls drift
from perch to sky, shifting judgement
between their current entertainment
and possible future feast.
“What can we do?” I ask my friend,
eyeing a possible rescue route: down
a steep and brambled understory,
slick mud, litter, lapping river, then up
a long branchless trunk to the crux
of this crow’s dilemma.
“And what then? How will you cut the line?”
We both picture the knife.
We had come upon it, as we started our walk,
where it lay on a rotting bed
of leaves in a drinking fountain.
I had fiddled with its benign handle until
the gutting edge slipped cleverly free!
We had joked: “this could be
an omen,” and returned it to its mis-place…
“Don’t suppose you have a pocket knife on you?”
I ask a couple strolling in practical coats,
holding hands. They would not have noticed
this crucifixion of a common crow.
“No,” they apologize, walking on,
glancing back.
“Crows are smart,” my friend says.
“Tool users, surprisingly analytical,
you’ll see when we pass this way again…”
But I am reluctant to move on.
My crow has managed to grope a claw-hold
among the twigs and rest, single wing
strung awkwardly. Then she pulls again
and loses her grasp. All flutter,
claw and instinct she struggles,
tightening the lines that hold her
suspended.
My friend pulls me down the path,
directing my distraction to the flotsam in the river,
a heron, the eagle pair flying in tandem,
the small huddle of bird watchers with
binoculars and clipboards.
“If you’re counting crows or gulls,
you might be interested--” I point.
“Just past the parking lot and portables,
it’s like a scene from The Birds!”
Their curiosity is only polite, as we describe
the tragi-comedy playing out downriver.
They have their own stories.
We reach our turn around where
public path terminates in public art
and high-rise apartments.
I feel the familiar
inner constrictions that signal
my wry analytical narrative might succumb
to the raw bellow of instinctual sorrow.
How burdensome both must be
on those who choose to walk with me.
Then I picture the crow and hope
suspends me:
“Do you think…?” I clutch
my friend’s sleeve. She shrugs.
“We’ll see.” My friend steers me
forward into other conversation until
we find ourselves looking down
a row of non-descript ash trees.
Which one was it?
We listen. We scan for the black and white
ornaments of crows and gulls.
“Guess that show’s over!”
It begins to rain.
I strain to see the dangling line,
a broken branch,
perhaps a pair of gulls
still laughing…
Nothing. Not even
one black sacrificial feather left
as relic of the struggle.
We return to the car, forgetting
to look again for that knife.
“Thanks for the walk,” I say,
as my friend turns the key.
“De nada.”
The defrost fan labors. The wipers begin
their rhythmic efficient flap.
“And for—"
my words hang.
“You know, Robin,”
she says, shifting to drive,
“we never get anywhere
as the crow flies.”
Hear Robin read her poem:
Robin Woolman is a teacher of physical theater in Portland, Oregon. Poems tend to germinate while backpacking in the high country or strolling her neighborhood. Her poems and plays have appeared in Cirque, Deep Wild, Poeming Pigeon, Westchester Review, and Red Shoe Press’s 2023, 2024, and 2025 Oregon Poetry Calendars.
My heart struggles with the crow. I find this poem most engaging. Thank you