Category: Wildflowers

looking for beechdrops’
nondescript stalks

the road down dips up

hollow or holler?
just ’round the bend
the stream falls away

deepening ravine

trees stretched thin
to reach the sky

musclewood

I was that skinny once

standing beside
its toppled twin

cucumber magnolia

beneath the white oak
200-year old charcoal
crumbles from the bank

the bright red club’s
rotten handle

jack-in-the-pulpit

jack or jill

transitioning to female
from the pulpit

its rust-reds and purples
in season at last

corrugated pipe

shelf fungi
growing at right angles
since the tree fell over

with such deep-veined hearts
you’d expect three-winged fruit

wild yam

young hepatica leaves

white hair’s in style now
I hear

another ash I never noticed

lit up by the sun
its death let in

for so many years
I saw it as an eye

island in the stream

don’t call them Indian graves
these mounds
that once held roots

God or microbes
everywhere you look
undiscovered

that gap between
crowns of adjacent trees
and what goes on underground

just one fling
on the way up

fox grape

Solomon’s seal

withered leaves curl around
the glossy black drupe

crustose lichen on a rock

its complex inner life

salamander
under the lifted rock

that frozen moment

turtleheads

self-consciously closing
my mouth

borer-killed
woodpecker-stripped
white
ashes

left behind
the salamander’s tail
goes on wriggling