A haze of jewelweed sprouts,
the dimpled embryonic leaves
like conjoined twins.
From the valley, the sound
of horses pulling a buggy
in their eight steel shoes.
The crooked sassafras—
something has found under its bark
a blood-colored door.
Morel hunting
Fungi are like us—
absorbing oxygen, releasing CO2.
This puffball is an abandoned factory.
I nudge the intact wall
with the point of my umbrella.
It’s all out of smoke.
Ovenbirds and the black morel,
writes a friend.
Impossible to see.
Springy
After all-night rain,
the forest floor is soft
and full of give.
A birch log collapses
when I step on it, but the bark
arches back after I pass.
New ferns uncoil,
heads slowly dissolving
into spine and ribs.
Effigies
Clouds hide the top of Ice Mountain
and it looks like a real mountain again,
no turbines in sight.
Below, the ugly subdivision
where a black family once woke
to a burning cross.
I find a shed antler on the powerline,
a twisted Y like the bottom half
of a stick figure.
Up in the hollow
A small cloud on the cliff
above the railroad tracks—
the shadbush is in bloom.
As I drive up the hollow on
our one-lane road, a red-tailed hawk
passes me going down.
All the spring ephemerals are emerging,
leaves wrinkled and damp
like freshly pitched tents.
Spring appetites
I eat my enemies by the handful:
spicy leaves of the invasive
garlic mustard.
Back home, I strip
in front of the mirror,
checking for ticks.
A squirrel walks past the window
with bulging cheeks,
carrying one of her young.
Return of the warblers
Mayapples are coming up:
green parasols shedding
the soil as they open.
A coyote trots across the road,
looking back
over its shoulder.
Above the trembling surface
of the vernal pond,
the first warblers’ buzzy songs.
In hepatica time
It’s cold. Mid-day
and the hepatica flowers are still
only half-open, nodding
on their thin stalks.
My mother tallies them up—
stroke-marks in her notebook.
At the top of a hemlock tree,
a porcupine sleeps in a sunlit
halo of quills.
Earth Day
The sun comes out
in the middle of a shower,
too high for a rainbow—
unless you imagine
the bird’s-eye view:
rainbow against the ground
and off to the side,
the radiant field lines
of this magnet, Earth…
Blue-headed vireo
The soft notes
of a blue-headed vireo
lure me away from my desk.
Night’s dust on my glasses
turns to a veil of gauze
in the noon-time sun.
The stench of manure
wafts up from the valley.
The vireo snatches insects from the air.