that a group of crows is called a murder is an urban myth but like all myths of the lexicon if enough people utter it it becomes true I spend too much time looking at birds for symbolism today running I saw at least eight crows their cold clacking beaks boulders of language & rushed to imagine what they might mean it has become almost pathological the need to name them to assign significance at times my notebook is more bird-log than self -log though increasingly there is no difference & after you after you left I did the same tracking of birds on my arm went for long runs near the Willamette to find them fifteen sixteen miles in the cold in the back channels often one or two lingered through the winter fulica americana or phalacrocorax auritus animals that take from other animals’ nests but on one run I saw three great blue herons ardea herodias thought hard after a fourth there being four of us before me my sibling you yours so in seeing the three I began keeping them close in mind ready upon the fourth to assign one to each of us the hunched heron in the back eddy clinging to leafless maple the one in pond sludge with its hapless bobbing I stood by the third a long time it was tall waving in the main current the river there not technically the Willamette but the North Fork of the Middle Fork a gnarled nest of language when nearly all the river is there so most call it by its single-word name anyway another myth of the lexicon come true I stood on its bank like that third bird on a gravel bar was a kind of crossroads when from the very first heron I had hoped for a tidy four stood a long time with my hands bunched in my shirt everything gray even the bird whoever named it great blue must have been an optimist because it is a true slate maybe they had not seen its face -feathers messy & dripping dirty water like I had the cold silver spoons of its eyes I scanned the shore until my breath slowed my body stopped its twitching later when I called my father said I’d seen the four herons how beautiful how right in the precision of my language I could almost believe it
Lillian Emerick Valentine is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Montana with a fascination for birds, language and the environment. She is a recipient of the Hugo fellowship and the Kidd creative writing scholarship and has been previously published in Black Fox, K'in, Call Me [Brackets], and elsewhere. Prior to graduate school, she spent four seasons working on an organic farm, and much of her heart lives in the soil and the people who work it.
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