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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 )
Poetry of Light 
