The Project List

My wife likes to watch me work,

retired and out of my element, felling trees

around the yard, the roar of the chain

saw loud enough to shut her out, her planning,

and lock me into myself, focused, for a short while

anyhow, just long enough to take down a tree listing

too far for her comfort. And I can drop

a stubborn fir, most times, close

to a planned fall, laying it cleanly between two trees,

a trail of sawdust littered around a fresh-cut

stump and a soft mattress of boughs limbed

at my feet, limbs my wife would cart away

almost as soon as I severe them, cut

them off from the body where they grew,

useless now and burned as scrap in a smoky fire.

More times than not, though, I hang it

up against another tree, snagged

at the upper branches, interlocking

and holding it fast, compounding

my frustration and the task of finishing

the job, as she contemplates what to do,

what I would leave as it is, as it fell,

wait for a strong wind to bring it down,

let nature take care of itself in its own time.

And while my wife sees a project checked

off her list to do and a cord of wood cut

and split and stacked for the winter months ahead,

the poet I am, my element, in my dreaming images

nature cut down unnecessarily, man’s dominion,

and the concentric rings of a tree’s age,

exposed now, become but a life cut short,

as are we all, the ages of our own lives

cut down in our feeble attempts

to conquer what we cannot take,

take what we cannot conquer, to store

it away for the leaner years ahead,

the winter years of our lives that come

before we are ready, and ill-prepared,

despite the trees we fell and cut,

split and stack to keep us warm,

to ward off the waning years ahead.

The Scent of Springtime's Green

The scent of springtime’s green

is acrid and sharp, assaulting

my senses, pungent against the dark

of last year’s evergreens,

cedar and spruce and pine,

splashed now with new growth,

a soft green lightness, bright

among the shadows' darkening,

awakening me, too, to a new season.

untitled

On a dismal day, damp with a drizzly rain

and the islands obscured by fog and mist,

a lone loon floats by, unconcerned,

and disappears below the surface, feeding.

Wandering a Wooded Trail

When the spirit leads me to wander

a wooded trail, the poet’s road less traveled

to clear my head, I take to an old farm road

once traversed by horse teams hauling in

and hauling out, a road long since grown over

and returned to a wildness crossed by hikers,

their northward trek from Georgia, or south from Maine.

The old farm itself, though, yesterday’s progress

and prosperity, is gone, spent and gone to ruin,

nothing left but an old stone fence, fallen and crumbled

into bouldered heaps hidden among the undergrowth,

over grown, no longer holding back cattle or kine,

nor kin; and the farm’s foundation, the old family home,

is reduced to a cellar-hole, filled in and sunken,

leaving barely an impression seen in passing -

nature reclaiming her own, as nature does,

in time, and in time reclaiming us all.

Sometimes, Out Walking

Sometimes, out walking, the dog and I,

we hear footsteps behind us, clearly heard,

and my heartbeat quickens, even as her ears

perk up, a low growl loosening her throat,

and she strains against her lead, tight and firm

in my grasp, clenched securely against my own rising fears.

Yet when we turn, curious, there’s nothing there,

or, maybe, only a leaf, brown and brittle,

skitters across the path we’ve walked, falling away;

but it’s too light to be the same steps we imagine,

this heavy crunch we hear against the earth, solid

and slow, echoes, perhaps, of our own feet plodding.

Or perchance, it’s spirits walking about, ghosts of a past

long ago, and restless. And as we give them form

and substance, a shape to fill in our minds,

we hear them walking about, following us here,

out for a stroll themselves to clear their heads, as we do,

wandering these back roads and by-ways, an endless wandering,

this journey we take now into our own imaginations, wild

and heightened, our fears fueled and flourishing

out of the unseen sounds behind us, walking here, the dog and I.