The beech tree has seven eyes
where limbs used to be,
each of them gazing upward.
Down below, the scars
of old, knife-cut graffiti:
Smoke Up. Fly High. Manson Lives.
A warbler in the crown
of a neighboring oak,
its shadow crossing my face.
The first surveyor—1795—
labeled this mountain Violet Hill.
Did he study it in the blue distance,
or see right at his feet
the crowds of violets fluttering
under the attention of the rain?
A warbler just back from the tropics
sings quietly, as if trying to locate
all the notes.
That gobbling on the ridge:
turkey, or turkey hunter?
That whistle: factory or train?
I follow a vole’s progress
by watching where the grass trembles—
until a breeze springs up.
How the weasel must hate the wind!
And how it must strive to sound
exactly like it.
Fungi are like us—
absorbing oxygen, releasing CO2.
This puffball is an abandoned factory.
I nudge the intact wall
with the point of my umbrella.
It’s all out of smoke.
Ovenbirds and the black morel,
writes a friend.
Impossible to see.
After all-night rain,
the forest floor is soft
and full of give.
A birch log collapses
when I step on it, but the bark
arches back after I pass.
New ferns uncoil,
heads slowly dissolving
into spine and ribs.
Clouds hide the top of Ice Mountain
and it looks like a real mountain again,
no turbines in sight.
Below, the ugly subdivision
where a black family once woke
to a burning cross.
I find a shed antler on the powerline,
a twisted Y like the bottom half
of a stick figure.
A small cloud on the cliff
above the railroad tracks—
the shadbush is in bloom.
As I drive up the hollow on
our one-lane road, a red-tailed hawk
passes me going down.
All the spring ephemerals are emerging,
leaves wrinkled and damp
like freshly pitched tents.
It’s cold. Mid-day
and the hepatica flowers are still
only half-open, nodding
on their thin stalks.
My mother tallies them up—
stroke-marks in her notebook.
At the top of a hemlock tree,
a porcupine sleeps in a sunlit
halo of quills.
The sun comes out
in the middle of a shower,
too high for a rainbow—
unless you imagine
the bird’s-eye view:
rainbow against the ground
and off to the side,
the radiant field lines
of this magnet, Earth…
The soft notes
of a blue-headed vireo
lure me away from my desk.
Night’s dust on my glasses
turns to a veil of gauze
in the noon-time sun.
The stench of manure
wafts up from the valley.
The vireo snatches insects from the air.
The sun slips over
the gray pelt of a vole zipping
from one hole to another
and catches on a distant gleam
of frost-heaved flotsam,
luring me to go look.
A beer bottle at the base of a tree
rests in a cradle of leaves,
bluer than the sky.
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.