Last fall I saw a solo crow in midtown. She was seemingly stuck and banging about on one of the thin window ledges of the Padulo office tower.

Was she attacking the windows? Her own image?

I’ve seen birds Quixote their own image in windows. They think the reflection is a rival in mating season. But mating season was way down the line.

I stood with my dog watching at the corner of Yonge and St. Clair for a while.

The crowing was a complaint, and a plea. Look, help. An angry complaint of danger obvious to the crow only. Anger toward, I am now convinced, the fatal human vanity of taking up earth and sky with crow-useless buildings and their miniscule window ledges.

A few days later I was on a break at work, walking my dog. I could hear the crow again. The same kind of anger. She was on the low ledge of a bank building backing onto a public transit bus hub. Teenagers were throwing French fries at her to either feed or mock her. She ignored them. I walked back to work with my dog.  The crowing was resonant all the way.

Over the next few months, I kept seeing the crow from my window at work. She would land on mid-rise rooftops in the distance, appearing in my window’s backdrop behind someone’s head or shoulder whom I was facing. Her image in these moments was atemporal and achromal, a black and white still.

The public crowing episodes faded away, but she at times seemed to sail purposely above me on walks, letting out one or two low caws. The sound like a familiar tug on my coat.

Meaning? I don’t know. But I think of feelings, not meaning. Makes me ask: Can I as a human animal have feelings that are animals? I’m not thinking of similes to describe human feelings. Angry as an elephant. No, something integrative, existential, primitively magical and metaphorical. I feel elephant. I feel dog. I’m squirrel.

Tonight, from behind the winter black reflection of my office window, I am crow.

I wonder, can I desire to work backwards from this concept and communicate through it in so-called everyday language? Into fragments? Blunt, beautiful units of sound?

I wonder, would I disappear as an identity into this integration, or somehow become more alive? Or both? Me caw, Caw.

Can a tug at my coat coax into bird flight a breathable life—my blunt life—beyond buildings where language phrases like “I am now convinced” and  “I wonder” fragment into a new freedom with new meaning?

Or, as earth & sky, accord freedom without any meaning?