Mest leste ▸
Snow in March
brings marvels:
a phoebe diving for snow fleas,
the track of a chipmunk,
a turkey vulture flapping its wings.
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Purlieu
The art museum’s smallest room
is filled with miniature landscapes.
We stop in front of each,
& my 8-year-old niece waits for me
to hoist her up by the armpits
for a five-second look.
I learn a new word from the exhibit’s title: purlieu. “A frequently visited place, an outlying district,” says Merriam-Webster’s New Collegiate. In the plural, “Confines, bounds” as well as “Neighborhood, environs.” From the French, “to go through,” it came into use in the Middle Ages, when it had a fairly specific denotation: “ME purlewe land severed from an English royal forest by perambulation.”
Later, she watches from
the back seat of the car as
a ten-dollar bill change hands. Giggles.
“They hold the money
Outskirts
A blind place
where the rails have an agreement
not to conclude—
In place
Inside a cloud moved
rapidly by the wind,
I catch a whiff of wood smoke.
All the tracks have melted through,
erasures that say only
that something was there—
except for the trees,
still marooned on the same
round islands.
March
A four-pronged twig tumbled by wind
has left the oddest tracks
in the snow, no two alike.
The fox, by contrast,
has walked more than a mile
in her own, earlier footprints,
leaving a single set
of blurred tracks with toes
pointing in both directions.
Deep snow
In all this blankness,
a squirrel finds the precise spot
it buried a nut.
Breaking trail with snowshoes,
I choose to believe
I’m half-floating, not half-sinking.
Clumps of snow sail off the trees,
making a random scatter
of oblong prints.
Wildstyle
On a low mound in the woods,
two coyotes have left
overlapping turds—
like graffiti tags
made of mouse hair
and small bones.
I follow their tracks.
They diverge in an old clearcut
choked with tree-of-heaven.
Sheep
The sheep beat a track over the mountain,
And men, sheep-like, follow them.
Who is there with heart enough
To beat a track for himself?
Not the strongest.
Not the wisest.
Not the most proud.
The Answer
O, my feet have worn a track
Deep and old in going back.
Thought released turns to its home
As bees through tangling thickets come.
One way of thought leads to the vast
Desert of the mind, and there is lost,
But backward leads to a dancing light
And myself there, stiff with delight.
O, well my thought has trodden a way
From this brief day to that long day.