Counting crows while driving to New York

 

Seriousness

by Stephen Dunn

Driving the Garden State Parkway to New York, I pointed out two crows 
to a woman who believed crows always travel in threes. And later just 
one crow eating the carcass of a squirrel. "The others are nearby," she 
said, "hidden in trees." She was sure. Now and then she'd say "See!" and
a clear dark trinity of crows would be standing on the grass. I told her 
she was wrong to under- or overestimate crows, and wondered out loud 
if three crows together made any evolutionary sense. I was almost get-
ting serious now. Near Forked River, we saw five. "There's three," she 
said, "and two others with a friend in a tree." I looked to see if she was 
smiling. She wasn't. Or she was. "Men like you," she said, "need it writ-
ten down, notarized, and signed."

"Seriousness" by Stephen Dunn from What Goes On: Selected and New Poems 1995-2009. © W.W. Norton, 2010.