August
i from the sketchbook
I thread the blackberry thicket for the shaded stone.
August has shriven the grass, the green sargassos of June,
And summer's alfalfa is lusterless gold in a nimbus of heat
Waiting the baler. It wavers, helpless, a phalanx of light.
August drums as bright thunder trumpets the field,
And the maple's khaki undersides lift in brisk salute
To shadows stalled against the pitiless scope of the sun.
Rain will riddle the valley, strafing blistered grains,
And black-eyed Susans in unison rise like the girls of St. Anne's.
Where foxglove in her petticoat has crowned the hill—
An indolent cotillion girl who tosses gold
From her shoulders, and proudly rustles yards of crinoline—
Freckled goldenrod assembles, choir boys,
A drift of anise, bobbing over their churchyard gate.
A sunflower's ovate leaves become the rough arms
Of a drowsy fieldhand, leaning on a split-rail fence,
Whose mouse-brown eye, alerted, lashed with gold, translates
The clouds as victory, the wind's voice as rain.
ii
I knew the river wasn't theirs at all. Just once
When January sun on snow had made us wince,
When hickory and juniper were frosted cakes
On Barker Hill, my father tracked the Squanicook
With one gloved hand above the valley's heart—a braid
Of shattered mirrors bridging fields and barns and roads,
Through yards resigned to her encyclical despair.
In watching shards fragment those stalwart gabled spires,
I saw a fractured picture of our town and knew
I heard an ancient, urgent fury break the snow,
A fierce quicksilvering of winter's crusted dyke.
I watched it runnel gently where we crouched; its wake
Defied the valley, joyfully sped from where we gazed.
I felt the shrugging off of nature's deep disguise.
The river favored us. She lived and leapt the gorge.
iii from the notebook
The shadblow sheds it purple fruit and spills its seed,
The linden bartering yellow bouquets for a necklace of gourds.
Unbraided pennons, catkins of the willow, fill
Like ragged sails. A towering cumulonimbus patrols
The eastern skies. I watch magenta clover drone
On sleeping epaulettes and know the sun-soaked earth
Is breeding still: in torpid pools, in stagnant ponds,
Rebellious nature sets her offspring quarreling
For food and territory—in-bred stone-flies riot
For their rations where the water striders run
Their useless marathons; inflammatory toads
Attempt a revolution, all in vain. In time,
The planet's microcosmic battles merge and fail,
Leaves of drying blood consumed, a season's compost.
iv
We walked the property a thousand times, as if
Without our walking there, the landscape might dissolve.
His trees were young. A drought-summer spark had cleared
The western third some time ago, and when he could,
He meant to have that forest back. He planted spruce
The size of children's pencils, fifteen hundred sprays
Of evergreen, each year as spindly as the last.
It hurt to watch him tearing up the ones he'd lost.
We carried water from the brook sometimes. It sluiced
A dozen clotted paths, where once an ancestor sliced
The forest open, and oxen, yoked, had dragged a road.
This was ours. New Hampshire, north of us, was broad
And diffident as France. With vague disdain, at six,
I knew our woods was better—even my burdocked socks
Belonged to Massachusetts. And I loved our field
Whose hundred-year-old hair had not been cut; it filled
With captivated birds. A thorny orchard kept
A dozen wizards prisoner. I watched their script
Of runes engrave the granite sky with ancient debt.
Everything the woods could teach, my father taught:
Delight, exactitude, a faith, his journeyman's doubt.
v Fire
Father, I'm dizzy in shimmering August, rising new
As summer's mistress from a field of corn. She now
Is married to the heat-swept grain. Her ripening breast
Is a thicket, bright with blood-berries, her body dressed
In flame. The red god of the salamander sandals her foot,
A monarch touches her lip, her coppery hands fit
Petals in a chain. She knows she has chosen to burn
At noon, as nature intends. The thrust maize, unborn,
Has made her heavy and drugged as a bee. A tawny wood-
Dove sleepily croons what her tongue cannot: the subtle wound
That too much plenty makes. She doesn't know that winter
Ravages, that grief and habitual wind will tint her
Skin and break the tender stalk of her body. She stands
Impaled by arrows of afternoon light until thunder stuns
Her—she slips like smoke into shade, behind the burning stones.