Then one unto the other said
Where shall we go and dine today?
“The Twa Corbies,” Scottish ballad
Two buzzards roost on either side
of the Hartsville Pike exit sign
hanging across the interstate.
An image so symmetrical
it’s sinister. You rush to make
sense of two buzzards dreamily
centered over the expressway.
It’s deeply comic, a gimmick,
you think, a billboard hawking some
backwoodsy diner. Heckle & Jeckle
as squawking hillbilly mascots.
Or, it’s the opening edit
of a Stanley Kubrick movie,
the looming establishing shot,
the camera pulling in slow, dragged
down by a Ligeti soundtrack.
(Oh György, such dread foreboding
in music unhinged from the rules!)
It’s a bad omen, rotten luck,
a jinx foretold to drive under
them at seventy miles an hour.
You fear you’ll crash through some portal
smeared with pitch and briers. You just know—
when you check the rearview mirror
before the tar-hole closes like
an iris wipe behind you—those
buzzards will be hissing at you.