I’m walking past ranks of even-aged red pines with a native broadleaf forest rising in the understory to a height of some thirty feet now: a visually striking natural insurgency against the industrial monoculture. Molting birds skulk through the dense foliage while a hermit thrush still sings just up the hill. A very small brown and white feather floats down.
*
If i didn’t know that these mushrooms were poisonous, would I still find them repulsive? Yeah, probably. The death angel looks delicious — which apparently it is. Then it dissolves your liver.
*
One of those days when even the rocks sweat and the biting insects form clouds dense enough to block the sun, and here I am circling a bog. My addiction to walking is beginning to seem nearly pathological, even to myself. But here’s the thing: I’m having a blast.
Oh what a lovely breeze!
Say, are those storm clouds?
hemlock sapling
bound in red surveyor’s tape
how hot it is
*
Why would I slog through a buggy bog, you ask? That’s where the prettiest mud is.
***
Portentative
sky face says meh
to the white noise
of our anti
bodies of work
squeezing whole lives
into a few hours before sleep
while six-legged leaves
chant half the night
sky face acquires
a round cloud mouth
the moonlight denies
ever knowing the moon
the lives we’re missing bloat like corpses
as species dwindle
sky face is just the void
with better branding
