Elegy With A Dream Of A River II

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.