Forget my young crows at the wildlife rehab and the damp
insides of their rosy mouths as they slurp food off my fingers.
Try not to recall the fatness of the orphaned groundhogs
or the stare of the injured hawk heavy on my arm.
Surrender the newborn squirrels with their sealed eyes,
their claws like thistle creeping up my belly. My family
waits for me to join them, to speak. My parents are fading
and my children are no longer fledglings. I must return
home, with the musky scent of suffering turtles
on my chest, with my partialled heart, with vulture feathers
in my hair and snake skins scattered on my shoulders. Even
without me, robins will sing their requiems. And the mink
with his webbed feet will hunt at midnight, half
his soul on land, half in water.
An earlier version of this poem appeared in my chapbook Animals / Bodies, Finishing Line Press.
—
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 “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 and 2011.
