Category: Nature/Ecology

and what if my photos lose
any center of interest
becoming pure tapestry

i want no subjects
i want the impossible world itself
without me in it

after a late hard frost
i want to stroke each velvety leafling
on the mountainside

nothing is realer right now
than this green
i get off my train of thought for it

for an enormous oak with tiny leaves
twirling on their twigs against the clouds
like larval dragons

as the wind turns rainy
as a dog’s tongue
and the green fades with the daylight

i count mountains to fall asleep
leaving room in my dreams
for their lost languages

before the Great Hill People
wiped out the People
of the Blackened Ridge Pole

and Scotsmen came from Ulster
enlarged the void with rifles
and whiskey made from maize

clearcutting and prospecting
shooting the cougars
trapping out the wolves

without whom an alien
far less palatable greenness
spreads over the land like mold

i have been battling it with both hands
pulling out rampant barberry
privet and autumn olive

stopping to listen to new warblers
still flying thousands of miles
just to breed here

that nasal buzz
of a black-throated green
or a black-throated blue

and my camera is only a phone
with so many missing contacts
i hold it up to the sky

1

the evening sky pulses
like an organ of light and void

the planets aren’t up
to anything i tell myself

a weasel’s shrill cry
behind me in the meadow

i recall the seething darkness
of tadpoles in a shrinking puddle

and the predatory newt who watched
over them as they hatched

east- and west-bound freights
pass each other moaning

a satellite crosses the heavens
without so much as a twinkle

2

dawn sky
through skinny branches

a thin blade of moon
in its halo like a fish on a platter

a quiet trickle from the spring
gives way to guttural trucks

the open range of the night
is closing fast

any minute now the birds begin
their summoning spells

3

if the earth’s ache for rain
should become my own

let me suckle at the root
of the lightning tree

for seventeen years
like a cicada

thunder might become
an antidote to numbness

there may be a howl
that holds us all in its bowl

spring peepers will keep up
their transmissions

4

ground fog and glowworms
build and fade
below the milky way

meteors leave
the briefest of trails

on the horizon the blink
blink of a red-eye flight

i try to picture other skies
elsewhere in the galaxy

what exotic stars
what mysteries of lifelessness

and how many more lives
might i have i wonder

as these stars start to fade
and tires resume
their dull rounds

giving the road called i-99
its red breakfast

pausing for breath i gaze up
into blossoming red maples

from one of which a red-
tailed hawk lifts off

the wake-robins’ wine-dark
buds are loosening

gnats circle my head
baffled by my glasses

i can hear a waterthrush
up around the next bend

of the stream that carved
this whole masterpiece of a hollow

though you’d never guess
from the way it breaks

over every rock and log
like something fragile

i push my glasses back up
and resume pulling weeds

for my mother, Marcia Bonta