Arrow-tall Hickory pelts the earth with its potential offspring. In childhood, I spent many a day beneath just such a tree as squirrel or chipmunk or blue jay; peeling back thick, green, four-petaled husks till my fingernails were tarnished; cracking open the small taupe-brown orbs within; picking out and eating the sweet nutflesh.
Chipmunks share
the morning’s news in
ringing, staccato notes;
And Jays fall
from trees in
blue-blazed truth,
hunting among acorn-hued leaves
for those derbied nuts.
The Electron finds a
white-laced length of shed
snake skin,
too delicate to lift
with slender twig.
The light is diffuse, gentle.
The air is cool and sweet.
Absorb this
’til it imbues thought
and act
and gesture.
Carry it out and into
the World beyond these
wooded doors.
— C.Birde
“Autumn Tourne”, C.Birde Oct. 2015
I think I am in withdrawal — no more two-, three-, four-plus-hour hikes through landscape that transforms and surprises with shift of wind and sunlight’s exposure. No more sandwiches and chocolate atop weathered, bald-capped mountains; nor the chitter and scold of red squirrels, otherwise silent as breath. The Canine Electron, I am certain, misses the adventure, as well.
But today — this moment, right here, right now — is lovely. A great depth of Autumn sky sprawls above our small, familiar patch of Earth. Together, we have put some miles beneath our eager feet.
My heart’s beats —
moss-covered and fern-filled,
deeply wooded;
clasped in pink granite and
ultramarine;
bound by star-pierced night —
I have brought the Island
home with me.
— C.Birde
