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Dave Bonta
they must love the milk
that makes them so bad-tasting
milkweed bugs
memorial bench
all the young trees
it shelters now
the fog still lingers
in a funnel spider’s web
deertongue grass
the “creep” in “creeper”
battened to a locust trunk
by a thousand tentacles
glossy orange
to mark the hatchet-cut scars
property line
beyond the line trees
the same old view
chestnut oak seedling
“leave no trace”
only my footprints now
where spring beauties bloomed
black locust grove
the leaf miners have laid bare
a rich vein of sky
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.
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.
If it calls often,
it’s a hairy woodpecker,
less often: a downy,
never: an ivory-billed.
Each year the ground grows simpler
and the sky more complex.
Right over there,
in a hollow locust tree,
a hive of wild bees used to sleep.
one million beetles
hiding under
one million leaves
locust leaves
skeletonized by beetles
hiss in the wind
already brown
before the storm toppled it
black locust limb
a leafminer beetle
lands on my thinning scalp
black locust grove
locust leafminers
now the leaves get more of the sky
than just sunlight
the locusts look as if
they’ve been eaten by locusts:
leafminers
Its hot voice sizzles from some cool tree
Near-by :
It seems to burn its way through the air
Like a small, pointed flame of sound
Sharpened on the ecstatic edge of sunbeams.