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.