Earthening
My newborn nestled
against my chest
while we wandered the city.
When we reached home
she stared at my face
as she fell asleep,
and I slept next to her
in that sort of heaven.
In a church of frankincense
and myrrh, people applauded
another new baby with a hundred
adjectives—adorable, lovely.
They left gifts of silver and lace
while a priest freed the baby
from the fires of an earthly life.
Devoted to oceans, myself,
I laid my baby in the ashes
of a Maine sunrise, under a nest
of osprey chicks offering
their voices to her songs.
I dipped her in my untamed
adjectives of the wild, skimmed
her feet across an incense of surf.
Menopause on a Winter Night
Now that bleeding has left me,
is there something I can do at night
when I wake to words begging
for sentences I cannot put together?
26 letters hike the sand hills
of my mind like invocations
in this January desert.
Is there something to be done
about my old mare scraping
the dark corners of my sleep?
Her blonde hooves summon
me to the empty field
where the wave of her long
eyelashes rolled against
my cheek as she died.
Is this how absence asks
if it has all been enough?
Never More Than a Cedar Waxwing
My eggs were never more special
than those of a cedar waxwing’s.
And surely hers were more
pale, bluish gray, flecked with black,
and so of course more beautiful
in a nest of woven grasses lined
with rootlets, cotton or yarn
someone tossed away.
Her eggs in her orchard home,
mine alone in my cave.
My love was never more special
than that of a cedar waxwing’s.
Though surely hers was more
necessary, after all, since he flew
with her amid the flocks
to breeding sites through their years,
and helped her build her nests,
and brought her sugary berries.
My loss was never more special
than that of a cedar waxwing’s.
Though surely hers was more
sudden when he flew into a car
and fell where I found him in the road.
She waited beside him in the sun
until I lifted his body to the field,
where for hours she stood by him
in the grasses they’d used to build
their home, resolute in the belief
he would awaken and return to her.
Lisa Couturier is author of the essay collection The Hopes of Snakes (Beacon Press) and of the poetry chapbook Animals / Bodies (Finishing Line Press). She is a Pushcart Prize winner for her long-form narrative, “Dark Horse,” and she is a notable essayist in Best American Essays, 2004, 2006, 2011. Her prose and poetry are part of the James Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World at Texas Tech University.