Their little aerial game

Dropping sticks is a game

the summer crows have learned to

play, flying from May

to September, one above the other. 

The higher lets his toy fall through the

air to the other of the pair,

who returns the favor.  We gulp

to see these evening acrobats climb so

high, printed black against the sky

above the blacker hills.

They become absorbed in their little

game. It seems so tame:

one drops a stick, the other catches it,

what more is there to

say? Just that every day

my heart drops with it

through the empty air, till a strange

and gay and capricious bird, unknown to

me, catches that heart, and it soars again.

“Dropping Sticks,’’ by Frank Robinson,  an Ithaca, N.Y.-based poet, art historian and a former director of the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design

“American Crow,’’ by John Jacob Audubon