In Chilly Twilight

The birds are sorting themselves out, they’ve

Random conversations, and 

We, some of us, discuss 

Hummingbird territories

They revisit, we observe

Decide to come back

And today I learned a vixen can always take

Her kits to another den, in emergency, as if 

Here, under the barn is

Not right and I flashed on some 

Knots, gnarled, 

Some kind of architecture indigenous in a

Way I cannot know in 

My alleé, old evergreens and roots and 

Tangles, and I recall 

I see the

Dens

Beyond that bolt

About a vixen, though

I remember how 

I’ve seen 

From my bedroom in winter, 

For a few winters in my past 

Lumbering literally belly 

Swollen to her birthing

In snow up over her knees

To that den under ancient planks

 In the main barn

The determined mother

Flash of red against white snow 

As she’d skirt close and under the barn 

To where she’d always gone.

We spill out of winter and fight the rain

It’s spring, complaining into summer 

Our pace picks up 

And it is 

About the great commune 

Of territory. 

He tells me about that 

Water vein

As we plosh the staggering 

Water table

Bemoaning amid deep humid 

Bounteous green 

That vein, I believe that 

Runs into Boardman Creek, 

Which will grow I suspect

Nurture and rot things elsewhere

Beyond an old dwarf cherry tree

And watery, faltering passage thru

The arbor vitae hedge

On its course down to the bridge 

Whoever in wild dreams

Could rail about the water 

But here I do

While geology moves 

In her rhythms 

I remember an untended 

Pear and a

Hawthorne in the pasture that 

I leave 

Still and high, the bursting 

Ground there 

For the wilder things. 

Bullfrogs are fine, I note, 

Brushing aside anxious drift. 

I need to go in now

I feel like fiddling with dinner.