Trees sway like drunks
in a sudden gust of wind—
the clacking of their branches.
The whole hillside
is in motion around me,
standing here with my head cold
almost gone.
How marvelous it is
just to breathe.
Bark Ode
for Gary Barwin
It’s only in strong sun
that the winter woods resemble
a bar-coded label.
Today is gray.
I pause to stroke the bark
of a diseased chestnut oak,
ridges kinked and folded,
ordinarily straight lines
impossible to read.
Breaking through
Fresh holes gape in a maple trunk,
as if from some Roman
soldier’s lance.
The new, smooth ground of ice and sleet
hasn’t quite set;
I keep breaking through.
Cardinals peck at the plowed road,
gathering faux teeth
for their reliquaries.
Primary school
Children in the woods:
at first I mistake their distant yelps
for coyotes.
When did I stop climbing trees?
Views are best when seasoned
with a little terror.
Once I found a dead cicada,
stuck half-way out
of its former self.
January oddities
Let us bid a fond farewell to January. With its low-angled light and unpredictable conditions, it’s always the best time of year for spotting oddities. Icicles, for example, can grow feet from walking on the water. Continue reading “January oddities”
Walking the line
High winds. I press an ear
to the trunk of a ridge-top oak
and hear nothing but wind.
My footprints in the snow
are more than erased;
they’re raised up, scattered like ashes.
The woodpecker must hear any sound
an oak can make.
It taps out a response.
Haustorial
The sound of porcupine teeth
in the oak’s crown,
as lethal as mistletoe.
Ahead of me on the path,
the tracks of three deer
braiding and unbraiding.
I reach inside my coat
and find a twig. It’s happening
sooner than I thought.
2013 in photos: A week in the Caledonian forest
Less than 1 percent of the ancient Caledonian forest remains, much of it in the Abernethy region, where Rachel and I camped for a week in mid July. She wanted to prove to me that real forests still existed in the British Isles. Our first evening there, I went for a walk and discovered this dead sheep. Continue reading “2013 in photos: A week in the Caledonian forest”
Learning from the ice
Yesterday morning’s lovely, quiet snow turned to freezing rain in the afternoon. In the evening, it really began to rain hard, and continued for hours. Around 11:00, I started to hear crashes from limbs breaking up on Sapsucker Ridge — the side of Plummer’s Hollow dominated by black cherry, red maple, and other weak, fast-growing trees. By two in the morning, when I finally went to bed, the rain had almost stopped, but there was still a constant barrage of crashes. I feared the worst. Continue reading “Learning from the ice”
Encounters with the Neolithic (5)
(Read Part 4.)
After a week in the highlands of Scotland, we took a combination of buses and trains down to Glasgow and out to the west coast, where we caught the ferry to Arran, an island about which it is often said that it resembles Scotland in miniature: very mountainous in the north, with more rolling, agricultural land in the south. Continue reading “Encounters with the Neolithic (5)”