tall hemlock
almost 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
Trees
I like trees. I like them a lot.
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 (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
The Hollow (38)
fallen cucumbertree
the white undersides
of its leaves
roots lost their grip
on the saturated slope
seed pods still clenched
leaf duff undotted
by any black cherries
rained out
that mob of red trilliums
melted away
foam in the stream
The Hollow (36)
sandstone shelf
all the volumes I ever
wanted to read
road-bank hemlock
the orifice at its base
stuffed with stone
rockface
the separate neighborhoods
of moss and lichen
crumbling bedrock
since it was last sand
the sea too has moved
The Hollow (35)
after failing
this year to blossom
Clintonia leaves
seedhead
the two sterile florets’
showy bracts
the mountain road’s
one straight stretch
turning to look back
headwater stream
a dark and slender
mink’s road
The Hollow (34)
25 years
since the snow that brought it down
measured in moss
after the chainsaw
the silence
big as ever
windthrow
ice storm
blizzard
where are the canopy gaps of yesteryear
one small bird
to salvage all those logs
winter wren song
The Hollow (33)
elderly beech
bark gathered in folds as if
it doesn’t fit right
zigzag scar
in a hemlock trunk
its sealed lips
graceful
the arc of a tree’s
mid-life crisis
the vanishing distance
between their two positions
oakhemlock