Aug 28
Creatures great and small
tracked the chilies
and cherry tomatoes;
they gnawed the beets and potatoes
and destroyed the sunflowers
before the first bloom.
We lost most of the blueberries, probably 50 quarts, to three avian cartels:
the blue-jay gang, the catbird mob, and the brown-thrasher syndicate.
Some fresh magic comes up free to compensate,
a mushroom with the face of a planet that’s not one of ours,
or a globe of bubble glass.
It’s all still good under the moon.
Jan 31
What a difference a week makes.
We got about 14″ at the house a week ago
which revealed some usually invisible travel information.
Did this guy start from a hole in the ground
and make a run for the branch?
Or climb up from the branch to find the hole?
Or this one come out from the porch,
or duck underneath?
A hunter, naturalist, or gender-nonspecific scout
could tell if these were from the coming and going
of a narrow-footed mincing sasquatch,
or the launch marks of a rabbit leaping.
Most intriguing are the ones that just stop
as if lifted by some racoon rapture.
But by this week the snow has gone to ground and gone to air,
melted and sublimated down to traces,
and spring is getting busy.
Freed from a foot of snow
clusters of lichen and fungus bloom on a broken birch stick.
Rich loam-brown gills under
the dazzle-white caps.
The English ivy is unperturbed, by the snow,
or by the mulch of birch, apple, maple, oak and hornbeam leaves
or by the broken sticks of inhabited birch.
Spring is coming, or another, or several snows.
Life along the ground abides,
covered or not covered.
Sep 22
Some emergent mushrooms are pulled up by the moon.
Some by the sun.
Or Mars.
By Venus.
Or by an Angel.
Some tough and chewy, grapple on for the long run.
Some are social, aligned like the seats in the balcony.
Curtain rising, caught between my shadow and the sun.
Death comes, from Pluto, in the end.
But the flies and beetles and the microbes settled in for a week of feasting.
Up for a while, down for a while,
before long, up again.
Transformed, not ever ended.
Inside the grand circle of mountain ridges, inside the circle of trees that ring the grass, an abundance of pretty little things.
Beneath the ironwood tree, a fungal family up-reach through the ivy.
Marching order.
But at each center of the tanish, beigeish disks, a spot of blue.
Blue, why blue?
Our snake this week was a third the length, a quarter the girth, a fiftieth the mass of last week’s blacksnake.
A little garter garden guarder.
Two foot of pure, well, snake.
Looking both ways, tongue forked and flicking, smelling me.
Forked tongue tiny.
Between the snake and the tomatoes a pile of brush.
What’s not to lich?
Digesting slowly.
Glad to be coral, in full rut; as shameless, if a bit more delicate, than a baboon’s butt.
Gladolia, hereabouts.
Garden guarders, like the garter, may be verygolds.
Don’t stare directly at the fractals.
So nearly stepped on, just inside the kitchen door, a chevron,
an inch and a quarter, weirdly well drafted.
Joan of Arc’s shield?
Not impressive as a flyer, kind of a stumble flutter.
Fearless symmetry.
But eclipses my poor powers.
A tortoise can stretch it out, when life depends; but a snail not so much.
Maybe the head of the mushroom grows faster than the snail can run, but how shall she dismount?
Ticket to ride.
Six feet of blacksnake in the grass points to the tree with six bird feeders.
Can he unhinge his jaw enough to swallow a gold finch or a nuthatch?
We used to see whole eggs along the gullet every time we’d relocate the guy half a mile away
who’d returned to rob our chicken coop again.
It took a week to digest his dinner and crawl back.
He discouraged the broody hens better than we could.
Pointing at …
Maybe it isn’t birds. The feeders are a creature magnet, even for rabbits and deer.
It could be squirrels, gray or red or the white-belly fliers (when you fly at night, wear white).
Or ground squirrels or kangaroo mice or Noreegan wharf rats (so far from a wharf, so far from Norway).
All my length.
A couple dozen tree species crowd this brief segment of the ring around the lawn.
The largest temperate rain forest is in Alaska.
I think we’re next: not many steps to fill the leaf book of a fourth-grade science class.
Leaf scape.
A table rose, for company, two feet away this instant.
White, the outside of the petals, inside hot fuchsia, as my love is.
Red, red rose.
The black flower is in the house.
Black velvet.
The red outside.
The thick sticky golden pollen is the same.
Velvet red.
And a little ways into the woods, the Dr. Seuss flowers stretch thin and wide, enticing.
Wood note wild.
Such abundance here, where peace and beauty overflow.
But threats surround us that are imminent—to our earth and food and water and air.
Amid the rumble of half a hundred human wars and war’s alarms,
I know I can’t be young again, but still shall hold her in my arms.
Salaam. Shalom.
Jun 15
There is, to begin with, possibility.
Then I spot him, traveling towards the tractor at one foot per minute, a turtle snug inside a richly embellished box. The turtle I have been looking for all week.
Seeking shelter from the storm?
He sees me, but he doesn’t take me very seriously. He keeps the nose extended by which he beat Achilles across the line, so many races ago. Been here longer than you, he says, and I know things you are not equipped to know.
Looking at you.
I record the hieroglyphics, of course, for reading later. I’m on to him, the little hardshell walking billboard.
Ready to take the weight.
He holds me with his glittering eye. I could put you on your back, I say, and make a soup tureen of your shell. You may now go, he says, commit less harm today than yesterday. I’m expecting the world will be on my back soon enough. Was that not, I ask, exactly what I proposed a moment ago? Gravity is established law. You’re annoying me, he says, go on, I’ve prepared your way; but do not imagine I will forget about the soup tureen.
Red eye.
The turtle is right, I see that now. The path ahead beckons to me. We’d better both get moving, each at his native pace.
The way in.
Follow the stone crop along the stones, past the creeping thyme, then right to the Peace Rose, unseen.
Wot, mai I not stonden here?
But first I’ll have to decide about the mushroom. I could cut it up for dinner, which would not at all hurt the underlying life-form, but might prove fatal for me. It is a great white, so it is pure, the poison unalloyed, toxin simple. Unless it is wholesome despite it’s shade. Dilemma, dilemma.
With divots from fairie golf.
Ah! She will know, the tiny red toad. And she will speak to me, unlike the mute ‘shroom.
And she does speak, says that a toadstool is wherever a toad sits, not separately extant; that I must not malign the turtles under the earth or the pillar of toads that holds up the dome of heaven; and that she suggests I should not eat the fungus. After I offer, and she accepts, a tiny thimble of a somewhat hoppy local ale, she tells me everything I must do tomorrow.
Thumb toad at ready.
But that’s a story for another day.
