Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
When a three-legged dog chases its tail, the stakes are higher, somehow. These poems are like that: trios of unrhymed tercets that strain toward the phantom limb of a resolution but never quite reach it. I call this form 3verse. It takes its cue from the web comic 3eanuts, which consists of old Peanuts strips from which the fourth panel has been amputated. The result is something perhaps sadder but also freer, more open-ended, succeeding in ways the original strips could not.
Ideas for the poems usually come to me on mid-day walks, whence the working title of the series.
Most of the goldenrods still standing
at winter’s end are topped
by the empty habitations of wasps.
Dried half-pods of milkweed
cluster three to a stalk,
a Baroque superfluity of arch and wing.
From the woods, a drumming grouse
reminds me what real wings can do—
that accelerating heartbeat.
It’s the first petrichor of spring—
that musk the soil gives off after rain,
strongest when long delayed.
So who wouldn’t choose
a day like today for dancing?
Side by side, cackling softly,
the two pileated woodpeckers
hitch their way down a tall locust tree
all the way to the ground.
For a fuller description (and pictures) of this unusual pileated behavior, see Rachel’s blog post.
The March winds
have blown wet snow
sideways against the trees—
look in one direction
and the woods are white;
in the other, brown.
The snow sticks to our boot soles,
lifting like lids
from jars full of spring.
In small, murky ponds
that appear each spring
along the ridge crest,
dozens of wood frogs
float through the reflected treetops,
lust blatting from each fat throat.
Get too close and the show stops.
Another step and they vanish
into strings of bubbles.
See Rachel’s blog post (which includes a video of the wood frogs in one of the vernal ponds): “Monday is herp day.”
Fresh from their hibernaculum
under the lawn beside
the stone well,
the male garter snakes
thread themselves into a throbbing knot
and pull apart, thwarted.
Where is she? They circle
like eddies of wind, old skins
whispering through the grass.
The field sparrow is back—
that rising trill spilling
from a small, pink beak.
A yellow-bellied sapsucker
taps a ring of wells all around
the bole of a hickory.
You nap on the porch,
ears open to the creek and other
migrant tongues.
Camera out, you stalk
a mourning cloak,
avid as a book thief
for that two-page
spread of darkness
glowing in the leafless woods,
you and the butterfly—
both quick to fly but loathe to leave.
And edged in light.
A winter wren darts low
over the rushing stream
and unwinds its hurdy-gurdy song.
Not all water-lovers
are bouyant in the same way.
The waterthrush walks
on the bottom, tail bobbing
as if spring-loaded. We stand
dripping in the rain.
Just after your departure,
I find half a hummingbird nest
and an old broken crock.
The sun comes out.
A fly circles the lip
of a purple crocus.
The kestrel hunting meadow voles
keeps returning
to the same electric line.
The phoebes across the road
carry beakfuls of mud
into their nest.
Planting onions,
my thumb- and fingernails harvest
black crescents.
This summer while I’m gone,
the walking onions will re-plant themselves,
head-down in the dirt.