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
The Hollow (32)
the cousin who once
impersonated a bear
tall tree tales
just there
a barred owl used to blink
at the rare car
dim hemlocked light
recalling my childish fear
at a bobcat’s hiss
hemlock refuge
threatened by needle eaters
I avoid looking up
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
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 (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 (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 (37)
among straight ascenders
an ancient grapevine’s
grave accent
the last white asters
the woods are darkest
just before the fall
weak sunlight
witch hazel beginning
to extrude its rays
so green you’d think
it’s still spring
Christmas fern
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 (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 (40)
wood nettles
that angry guy who hacked at them
with his hatchet
becoming the place
of my fisher sighting
foamflower patch
the long moment
after it vanished
fishing for its name
wilder hills
and deeper hollows
the fisher’s undulating gait