A brown-striped breast feather
floats down from a high bough
in the spruce grove
where some hawk or owl
plucked a grouse. The outermost
trees rock in the wind.
I step carefully as a bridegroom
over each raised
threshold of root.
Camouflage
Harried by crows,
the pale red-tailed hawk
glides along the ridge
and lands in a stand
of black locusts broken
by last December’s ice,
one more pale wound
among the ragged spears
of raw wood.
Evolution
A circling crow
turns into a hawk
as it clears the trees
with their bare-boned
parceling of the light. And then
those upswept wings—
primaries splayed like hands
open to the ground—
can only be vulture.
Wintergreen
A gray day in March
is the best time to go hunting
for teaberries—
bright as fresh drops of blood
under the glossy wings
of wintergreen,
sharp and sweet
after all those months
of frozen burial.
Harbingers
After months under snow,
last autumn’s leaves
barely stir in the wind,
pressed flat as ears
to the forest floor.
Surely they know what’s coming.
Stones lie askew.
Whatever is beneath them shows no sign
of resting in peace.
The death of winter
On a warm day,
a patch of ice dulls over
like a dead eye,
except that something moves
under and through it,
like the soul—
that bubble of breath—
surrounded by meltwater
and the bluebird’s song.
Cold Front
in memoriam Bill Knott
With the cold front
came news of your death—
a failed bypass—
and a skim of snow
that vanishes at the sun’s touch.
Soon, only shadows are white,
like the letters
I keep trying to form
as my pen runs out of ink.
In place
Inside a cloud moved
rapidly by the wind,
I catch a whiff of wood smoke.
All the tracks have melted through,
erasures that say only
that something was there—
except for the trees,
still marooned on the same
round islands.
Emergence
A groundhog comes out of her hole
and begins to gather bundles
of dried grass.
Harlequin ladybirds
emerge from the side of the house
with a burning thirst
and dive onto the snow,
where they suck and stumble
and come to a frozen halt.
Snowmelt
The bare ground seems
at first an oversight, then
a growing scandal—
all that anonymity stripped away,
the brown earth caught
without its papers,
and the pines like secret agents
sifting every seditious
whisper of the wind.