The field sparrow is back—
that rising trill spilling
from a small, pink beak.
A yellow-bellied sapsucker
taps a ring of wells all around
the bole of a hickory.
You nap on the porch,
ears open to the creek and other
migrant tongues.
Searchers
Fresh from their hibernaculum
under the lawn beside
the stone well,
the male garter snakes
thread themselves into a throbbing knot
and pull apart, thwarted.
Where is she? They circle
like eddies of wind, old skins
whispering through the grass.
Rite of spring
In small, murky ponds
that appear each spring
along the ridge crest,
dozens of wood frogs
float through the reflected treetops,
lust blatting from each fat throat.
Get too close and the show stops.
Another step and they vanish
into strings of bubbles.
See Rachel’s blog post (which includes a video of the wood frogs in one of the vernal ponds): “Monday is herp day.”
Onion snow
The March winds
have blown wet snow
sideways against the trees—
look in one direction
and the woods are white;
in the other, brown.
The snow sticks to our boot soles,
lifting like lids
from jars full of spring.
Rain date
It’s the first petrichor of spring—
that musk the soil gives off after rain,
strongest when long delayed.
So who wouldn’t choose
a day like today for dancing?
Side by side, cackling softly,
the two pileated woodpeckers
hitch their way down a tall locust tree
all the way to the ground.
For a fuller description (and pictures) of this unusual pileated behavior, see Rachel’s blog post.
Old field
Most of the goldenrods still standing
at winter’s end are topped
by the empty habitations of wasps.
Dried half-pods of milkweed
cluster three to a stalk,
a Baroque superfluity of arch and wing.
From the woods, a drumming grouse
reminds me what real wings can do—
that accelerating heartbeat.
Reach
After a hundred years of reaching
for the same, small portion
of filtered sunlight,
these three witch hazel trunks
have begun to merge. The ground bulges
over their common roots.
Back home, you stretch
a measuring tape from hand to hand
along your outstretched arms.
In good light
On a maple’s pale bark,
a zigzag ladder—old tooth-marks
from a wandering snail?
Green islands of moss
beckon across a fluttering sea
of brown leaves.
This cloud-filtered sunlight
is perfect, says the photographer
as her cheeks slowly turn red.
Terminology
Earth tones—a term
no recent migrant from the tropics
would understand,
how a dormant earth
can come in moss-green, bark-gray
and a thousand browns—
umber, ochre, sienna—
and spring still a hollow gurgling
somewhere below.
Tintype
First phoebe of spring.
He flutters in front of me,
drawn by a slow fly.
In my email, a copy
of a tintype portrait
I sat for last August—
that still moment
five seconds long,
that black box.
Here’s a scan of the portrait, and here’s Rachel’s portrait. Alastair Cook was the photographer — here’s his website. I blogged about the experience: “Ancestral photography.”