By Lisa Couturier                

By now, you know the dishwasher washes best loaded
in a specific way no one else in the family seems to remember,
except maybe another woman, in another kitchen, and you
imagine that she, too, stands at her window of ambition,

staring at weedy grass, wondering if it’s time to yield
to the yard’s “inner-yard,” which is like your elusive “inner-child”—
that deep-rooted, rock-sharp, moss-scented girl whose existence,
should she resurface, would forgive what’s undesirable in you,

what was grown in shade and shame and has gone to seed.
At this stage of your mid-life-cycle, when all your friends are birders,
you long to hear something for the first time again, even the second,
which explains your obsession with birdsong—the phantom chorus*

of the forest that lures you toward trees and the rarely heard melodies
of a crow’s coos and purrs, because Caw caww cawww is not all
a crow believes. Like you, crows have more to say than people think.
Crows never forget what they want their lives to mean.

In woods musked with rain, you linger in slanted light to hear
the hymns of crows in the way you waited in the night for your
babies to cry and then sang them back to sleep when they did.
Those were your freest songs—the songs you sang before

you were tamed, when you preyed on questions and survived
on silence. Now, you want answers, as another day washes away,
     swishing, sloshing,
          running toward its end.

* “The Phantom Chorus: Birdsong Boosts Human Well-being in Protected Areas,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biological Sciences, January 2021

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Lisa Couturier lives on an Agricultural Reserve in Maryland with her horses, vultures and a family of crows who occasionally bring her gifts. A writer with the Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World, Couturier is a Pushcart Prize winner for her essay “Dark Horse,” author of The Hopes of Snakes (Beacon Press), the chapbook Animals / Bodies, winner of a Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize, and a notable essayist in Best American Essays, 2004, 2006, 2011.