Woodchuck in the woods. Also, yes—a groundhog in the ground.
Posted on by Dave Bonta

Woodchuck in the woods and other instagrammatic things

I have a hand-me-down iPhone 4S and an Instagram account linked to Flickr, and so I’ve been amusing myself with poetic one-liners. It started with a particularly antisocial woodchuck, who (unusually for his species) has a den in the middle of the forest.

Woodchuck in the woods. Also, yes—a groundhog in the ground.
Woodchuck in the woods. Also, yes—a groundhog in the ground.

big burl on a black cherry
Please excuse my extruded heart.
close-up of eroded root ball with pebbles capping columns of dirt, with trees in background
I would be a hoodoo too in my feet of clay…
Faded Virginia creeper leaves on dark, wet trunk of a white pine tree.
Dark as a coffin this pine bark wet with rain.
Fallen leaf of sucumber magnolia speared by a twig on the side of a sugar maple trunk beside the stream.
We don’t need a special day to wear masks. We need a day to take masks off.
Small striped maple sapling with a right-angle bend next to an enormous white pine.
Growing up with an overbite, you learn to chew carefully, and to distinguish a hundred subtle flavors of cruelty.
V-shaped sapling with its bark hanging loose in tatters where a buck has rubbed his antlers against it.
Imagine growing a new crown of thorns each year, that ache echoing down to take root in the rut.
Leaf of a dying wood nettle curled up like a slipper from the Arabian Nights.
Oh those golden slippers, we used to sing each autumn when the streets were indeed slippery with gold.
Wet trunk of a beech tree with round spots of pale blue lichen.
In between the drips of rain on my umbrella, the tut-tut calls of robins.
Round hollow in the base of an oak with a tongue-shaped piece of wood inside.
Those doctors who made us stick out our tongues to say “Ah!” — what kind of life-long habits did they teach us?
An old corrugated steel pipe, rusted into an extravagant range of colors.
Fall colors come late to the Appalachian ridges, forested as they are in oaks.

3 Replies to “Woodchuck in the woods and other instagrammatic things”

    1. Thanks, Robin. I find that the same walk that produces a photo or two is often good for polishing the one-liner in my head. I’m normally pretty verbose, which is why I so prize brevity in poetry.

      Reply
  2. Pingback: Re-introducing Woodrat photoblog – Via Negativa

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