half underground
as it joins the river
Plummer’s Hollow Run
Little Juniata
the name alone
is a river
no road sign
it’s not easy to find
the middle of nowhere
coda
self-check
a black-legged tick
burrowed in
The Hollow (48)
The Hollow (47)
railroad crossing
all the train horns
I hear in my sleep
in the unloved woods
between train tracks and river
needles and condoms
a shirt abandoned
by the fire ring
homeless campsite
floodplain
mosquitoes turning blood
into whine
The Hollow (46)
at the bottom of the mountain
a small mountain
of gravel
riprap
just enough soil
for anise root
where the hollow empties
its silence into the gap
old cellar holes
locked gate
stroking the touch-me-nots
so they burst
The Hollow (45)
in this foreign land
Norway maple leaves turn
ugly
upside-down somehow
in my phone’s photo
false Solomon’s-seal
backwater
stream-blurred trees come into
sharper focus
Keep Your Dog on a Leash
the notice board co-signed
by porcupine teeth
The Hollow (44)
tall hemlock
nearly dead from adelgids
unfeathered
every year more rain
railroad noise burrows
into the ferns
that ice avalanche
my brother’s mark on a tree
lost to moss
two faces
on the side of a beech
one has no mouth
The Hollow (43)
200 years old
or ten thousand
former road/streambed
rhododendron trunk
bare as high as a starving deer’s
neck can stretch
elevation measured
by the number of unripe
spikenard berries
slow-creeping slope
all the tree boles curved
to keep their balance
The Hollow (42)
whispering against
the road from both sides
endless water
backhoe toothmarks
our complicated relationship
with the mountain
gabion wall
the quarried stones softening
with moss at last
a beech log’s pale skin
beginning to rupture
that rich ferment
The Hollow (41)
38 years old
the one-acre blowdown
is all grown up
how big was that wind
twin basswood trunks
still stretch wide
one beech limb
has grown back into the tree
the storm was too much
they heard the wind
a half mile away
the hollow’s own howl
The Hollow (40)
wood nettles
that angry guy who hacked at them
with his hatchet
becoming the place
of my fisher sighting
foamflower patch
the long moment
after it vanished
fishing for its name
wilder hills
and deeper hollows
the fisher’s undulating gait
The Hollow (39)
standing
among the fallen
tuliptrees
“common though not abundant”
Liriodendron
tulipifera
massive trunks
the mechanics of rising sap
still a mystery
riffle-patterned bark
enough stillness
for algae