After months under snow,
last autumn’s leaves
barely stir in the wind,
pressed flat as ears
to the forest floor.
Surely they know what’s coming.
Stones lie askew.
Whatever is beneath them shows no sign
of resting in peace.
Wintergreen
A gray day in March
is the best time to go hunting
for teaberries—
bright as fresh drops of blood
under the glossy wings
of wintergreen,
sharp and sweet
after all those months
of frozen burial.
Evolution
A circling crow
turns into a hawk
as it clears the trees
with their bare-boned
parceling of the light. And then
those upswept wings—
primaries splayed like hands
open to the ground—
can only be vulture.
Camouflage
Harried by crows,
the pale red-tailed hawk
glides along the ridge
and lands in a stand
of black locusts broken
by last December’s ice,
one more pale wound
among the ragged spears
of raw wood.
Spruce grove
A brown-striped breast feather
floats down from a high bough
in the spruce grove
where some hawk or owl
plucked a grouse. The outermost
trees rock in the wind.
I step carefully as a bridegroom
over each raised
threshold of root.
Waiting to launch
The first greens
out of the ground are rockets:
dame’s-rocket, garlic mustard,
winter cress where it’s wet.
Then come the wild onions
up at the wood’s edge—
but not yet. I stand watching
a dark spot in the field that fails
to turn into a bear.
Tintype
First phoebe of spring.
He flutters in front of me,
drawn by a slow fly.
In my email, a copy
of a tintype portrait
I sat for last August—
that still moment
five seconds long,
that black box.
Here’s a scan of the portrait, and here’s Rachel’s portrait. Alastair Cook was the photographer — here’s his website. I blogged about the experience: “Ancestral photography.”
Terminology
Earth tones—a term
no recent migrant from the tropics
would understand,
how a dormant earth
can come in moss-green, bark-gray
and a thousand browns—
umber, ochre, sienna—
and spring still a hollow gurgling
somewhere below.
In good light
On a maple’s pale bark,
a zigzag ladder—old tooth-marks
from a wandering snail?
Green islands of moss
beckon across a fluttering sea
of brown leaves.
This cloud-filtered sunlight
is perfect, says the photographer
as her cheeks slowly turn red.
Reach
After a hundred years of reaching
for the same, small portion
of filtered sunlight,
these three witch hazel trunks
have begun to merge. The ground bulges
over their common roots.
Back home, you stretch
a measuring tape from hand to hand
along your outstretched arms.