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The red tailed hawk still perfect but road killed the colors of fall

The drifting snow burying the uphill windows to lit transoms

The absolute quiet of white

 The starving deer the dogs ran down in that hardest of winters

The deer’s bones in the morgue of the freezer until I would bury the bones in Spring

The brush fires I tended that burned hot or low for days under late snow or Spring rain

The old ghost tricking me in dreams to remember our children born of plunder and rape

The gourds that looked like the swollen bellies of whales

The purge of the creek in spring run off stripping bark clean from tumbling dead trees

The surprise of the rising waters climbing my calves the ground saturated to jelly

The path we called Cat Butt turned into a river the sound wild and competing with returning brown geese

A lightening flash snaking the grounding wire silencing the music playing inside with a preacher’s thunder

The swath cut through the static of long berry brambles catching hold and refusing to let go

The oldest grapevine living with the elder pine protecting each other with their roots suckling water from the bog

The young maples I sang with as I learned their grove’s language

The low valley road no one wanted to travel that opened my throat to the sound of a vowel’s reaching

The last call and thumping cry shock wave of each tree falling as loggers clear cut nearby

The hummingbird sitting in stillness on the tip of the branchless dead tree each summer’s day at four

The oceans of colored mushrooms swelling the deep woods just that one wet season

The bed of lace and leaves tatted by oak’s tannin where I lay in surrender to soft rain

 The purple woman’s hands of black cohosh rising from wet soil dressed in the mysteries of Spring

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Photo: Deep Woods by Nicholas_T  ( https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7296/8847022426_1d8de04c8c_b.jpg )