There are no conversations at the end 
of autumn. The only voice the crow’s 
arguing with himself, shouting obscenities 
from the leafless sweet gum tree. 
The neighbors packed up their picnics long ago; 
the summer bats and gloves rest in storage closets. 

A hawk occasionally circles the last fiery branch 
of back yard maple where an old man sits 
with everyone he ever lost. He sips his morning 
coffee and waits to discover what this emptiness 
might lead to next. Loss, of course, 
defines the world. He knows the truth of this. 

Of all the living that walked, swam, or wriggled, 
99% are gone for good. He read that once. What remains? 
The trees and leaf-mulch he’ll rake again. 
And the memory, unrelenting as the crow, 
of those who loved and helped him when 
he was young and believed he always would be. 

*Publisher’s Note:

Created by American visual artist Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) when he was 90 years old, Crow Tree Study (watercolor and pencil on paper, 2007) was exhibited through February 2025 at the Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. The Farnsworth Art Museum in Maine posted an image of the watercolor to Facebook (3 February 2024):
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=884228287038001&set=a.624055643055268

Additional versions were posted on 30 November 2024 by Oscar Fairley and two other members of the Andrew Newell Wyeth Facebook group (see their posts under Comments):
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1443427803283701&set=gm.1250021486052637&idorvanity=631695241218601

Rick Mulkey

directs the undergraduate creative writing program at Converse University; and he directed the Low Residency MFA at Converse as well, for 15 years, and continues to teach in that program. He is co-editor with Denise Duhamel of Ice on a Hot Stove: A Decade of Converse MFA Poetry (Clemson University Press, 2021).

Mulkey is also the author of five poetry collections: All These Hungers (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021); Ravenous: New & Selected Poems (Serving House Books, 2014); Toward Any Darkness (2007); Before the Age of Reason; and Bluefield Breakdown.

His poems and essays have appeared widely, including in Crab Orchard Review, Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, Literary Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, Poetry East, Shenandoah, and the Southeast Review, among others. And his work has been anthologized in A Millenial Sampler of South Carolina Poetry; American Poetry: the Next Generation; and The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volumes I and II.