Archive 03/14/10

   

Saturday Afternoon in the Woods

                                                                  

This land is in the throes of giving birth, prematurely, to spring.

Stark manifestations of its letting go the snowy mantle

Are, everywhere, in soggy, slushy, sloshy evidence.

Everyone knows that March isn't supposed to be April.

Deer, beavers, chickadees, otters, rabbits, squirrels, foxes,

Even the tough old make-do-with-next-to-nothing crows,

Realize that nature has lost its hold on things.

 

But that's just how it is, up here, in northern Wisconsin.

After all, the past week, in the high thirties, low forties,

Is the only motivation the snow and ice really needed,

To pack it in, for another three-season hiatus,

Subject themselves to metamorphosis, forgetting.

And so it goes, slowly, at first, the silent thawing, melting,

That magical transfiguration from solid to liquid to lake,

 

That mysterious process of terraqueous prestidigitation,

That ubiquitous North Woods legerdemain

Which has turned those two-foot drifts my snowshoes crunched

When I was last in these woods, this past Christmastide,

Into labyrinthine patches of cushiony duff —

Orange-brown pine needles, decomposing leaves —

Amidst decayed trees alive with gray-blue lichen, bright-green moss.

 

Being here, only a week away from the vernal equinox,

Invests me with a bittersweet sense of incompletion,

Vague melancholy mixed with even vaguer exultation.

I, like this land, its denizens, am suspended between seasons.

Will there be more freezes, more blizzards,

Or is this the end of one then, the commencement of another?

And what does now portend for who I'll be, when it's then?

 

 

 

 

         

                                               

 

03/14/10

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
       

 

 
   
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