Mowing

Sanctuary

Salvation

Every blade of grass, 

Bloom, every 

Slide as I sog into

Unrelenting mud 

Every

Color, 

Wild and everywhere 

And all the smells so glorious

I watch for bunnies

Hop toads, blown branches 

Too thick for mower chop

Coherence 

Here We Are

I am in the garden, it’s all garden, I am mowing, I am cutting the pasture high; I am outside, on the porches, on the patio, planting pots, shoveling away winter detritus on the patio; I am walking to the barn and walking back to the barn gardens, I am at the pond. I am walking in the middle of the road at night. Night vision. Burgundy Farm, Capon Bridge. The children were little. 

There was a small hastily-painted sign above a screen door at camp, pointing to a nest tucked away: “Carolina wren nesting, 🪹 don’t disturb her.” The sign didn’t have to say, so come in another way. 

Today I was sweeping off the front porch again. It’s a formal porch. No one ever comes to the front door. At Christmas we hang a large Maine wreath, with a spot on it, on the front door. Every spring, I hang baskets on the front porch. I move concrete urns with old ferns out there. It takes a beating from the elements, though it is a deep beautiful in the snow, which shapes itself into onto and around the porch and its Greek columns. But it is not an unoccupied or unused front porch, and we know the life out there. Fucking squirrels chew thru everything everywhere they can. I sweep up piles of insulation, hubs pounds away at the holes in the porch ceiling & calls in the posse when he can’t reach. The little bastards get in through the cornices as well. 

Each corner, on the outside columns’ pediments, contains a small built environment, nests. Every year they’re there. It’s quiet in the front; mommas are vigilant but not alarmed; soon the fledglings are fine. By the time I hang baskets all is sorted out. This season, though, the rain, incessant rain, constant, deluge, unrelenting, and wind, not thunderstorm wind, but derecho wind. The fucking weasels got the hens 6 weeks ago. 

I digress, but it’s all related. 

Yesterday when I went to sweep off the front porch, amid the squirrels’ rampage I’ve barely kept up with, I noticed a tiny feathery just gossamer ghostly creature, the nest blown down probably the night before when some fearsome straight line winds came upon us as once in awhile in terrible storm they will, and I think barely, barely hatched. I knelt a bit and whispered to it. It was a something, it had had a beating heart. 

Tonight. I swept. Wept. The wisp of the bird was bigger. My knees wanted to crumple. And as I propped my head against the hand clutching the broom, just aside atop my eye, a movement. Another wee speck of life. The smallest moving bird leg I’ve ever seen or will ever see again. A nanosecond of movement in a puff of lightest grey. What do I do? Grateful I was not vigorous in my sweeping. 

Would the Burgundy campers bury them? Would they cry for them? Oh life. 

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. 

After Hard Rain

Out here in the conservatory,

I sit in a kind of peace

Not being watched,

The blackness into the

Weatherby fields 

Deep and satisfying

And unmarred 

In a kind of miracle 

Into the west 

Seems my whole life I’ve been

Trying to just be who I am

A shame or maybe not that

I come to this sense this old

Remains to be seen. 

Endure

 I want to

Be pretty. 

I want to be 

Aware when peace descends 

In the midst of chaos 

I want to be my golden center 

In the palate of my landscape.

The further my eyes search 

Towards what I guess I 

Somewhere let go of, 

The calmer I am

Though

I may be going blind 

Probably just one eye.

This turns into a diary

Which it is not.

Sky, internal horizon, order and 

Balance

And I don’t much care to make too

Much effort anymore. 

Rain is endless, though.

I never thought I’d curse the 

Water

It’s a richness in a new iteration 

For me to integrate this 

Fallow ground into 

Its reason, as 

The less I go out looking for it the more it is what I want 

Raining

Pink begonias on porches here 

Waiting late spring’s summering, as 

Recalcitrant weather seeks to find balance.

At the pond, reassurance of 

Bullfrogs sounding basso & profundo; 

I see small brown hoppy toads, but 

I am frustrated because I can’t mow,

So I ruminate on paths, perhaps, and patches

Where wilding things persist, noticing 

A new way of being in to and of this place 

This property, out in that far pasture

Hawthorne and pear. 

Long the twilight to the southwest 

I listen to old prompts

From landscape and memory, 

When light dimmed before my prairie sense said it should

When night comes on before

My prairies senses say

It may, and behold 

The most intense pure 

Blue, no brilliance but the shadow

Just before the night comes in 

In the leaving to the west. 

Last Thing on My Mind

 https://youtu.be/KaRwthlUI-w