old corral
two years for horses
47 for trees
too red
half the maple’s leaves
are poison ivy
unchanged
for 180 million autumns
cinnamon ferns
fraying scrolls
illuminated with blue fungi
black birch log
The Hollow (22)
not knowing
what’s around the next bend
five-year-old me
the headless hunter’s
lantern on moonless nights
in her quavery voice
more frightening
than our neighbor’s ghost stories
those wooden legs
I still look for her house
but there’s just the red privy
its vacant hole
The Hollow (23)
spicebush fills
the opening the big birch left
that allspice scent
“heteromorphic
self-incompatibility”
partridgeberry’s red pills
END OF PUBLIC ACCESS
sun shining right through
the plastic sign
where the road crosses the creek
a crayfish
walking upstream
The Hollow (24)
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
The Hollow (25)
leaning
this way or that
forest-dwelling goldenrod
not a mere patch
but a stand
the black cohosh
fairy bells
berried
under their leaves
naked-flowered tick trefoil
“leaflets three” but only
the name itches
The Hollow (26)
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
The Hollow (27)
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
The Hollow (28)
road-bank beech tree
skinny roots hanging on
to each other
an exclusive crowd of beeches
smart gray bark
yet to canker
inward-looking
a beech tree’s eye-
shaped scars
even by day
the beech grove retains
something of the moon
The Hollow (29)
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
The Hollow (30)
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