What all of this - what all of us - amount to, if we're to be very clear, is a fling with some destined time and place. We see the black birds around us, cocking their heads this way and that, cawing their loud caws and we insist that they're being directed toward other people, not us.
Sadly, and sometimes not so sadly, we realize that they're for us, that those creepy feathered things have been watching us and they know us. They have a feeling that they know where we're headed, for they've flown some of those parts before and come back to tell about them. We can't make out much of what they're saying, though we realize that it's important and it aggrieves us to be so helpless in translating. These birds just remind us of the drafts that we're trying to keep out of our houses, away from our poor skin.
Lindsay Fuller, a Seattle songwriter originally born and raised in the heart of Alabama, gives voice to these ravens and to our fears about what they're getting at. They've seen the death that we've got coming to us. They've already picked at it on the shoulder of many roads - with hungry beaks and a sense of where to find more if there's not enough left on the bones that they tracked down. Fuller writes songs that remind us of the haunting knowledge that sometime - when most of us least expect it - our chests are going to stop going up and down.
All of our breath will be stripped clean, just like that meat from the road ribs that the birds are chowing down. It will be the shortest process ever - to go from one to the other, to have it all vanish, to find ourselves being mourned as we lie there stiff in a box, wearing the best clean clothes they could find for us in our closet.