Preface
Summer
A Summer Afternoon
The Water Sprite
The Beach
Enter Night
Firefly Night
The Midnight Market
Bear and the Moonlight
The Pond
Summer Storm
An Invitation
Autumn
Golden Goblin
Pumpkin-Picking Day
Cats in the Graveyard
Innocence on the Demon Path
The Haunted House
Moon in the Reeds
Omens
The Milkweed Pod Lovers
Bits of Joy
The Last Roses of Summer
Winter
Rapunzel
The Birch Trees and the Fox
Winter Morning
A Christmas Tree for Father Winter
I Do Love You, Winter
Beautiful Nightmare
Fear of Flying
Winter Departure
January Blues
Last Days of Winter
Spring
Transition
A Double Ring Around the Moon
The Forest’s Edge
Skunk Cabbage
Sprinkle, Sprinkle Flowers
What Has Hatched Here?
Blue Heron
Dandelion Days
The Full Spring Field
My Passing
Acknowledgments About the Author
Enter Night
night drops quickly. The trees go jet black, bold charcoal silhouettes cutting downward across the landscape.
Twilight blue light vibrates between the vertical trunks and through the heavy branches of summer, the leaves deep smudges, full thick taps of oil paint, patted on the trees’ tips.
Then, SLAM, full dark. All is deep velvet and quiet, bushes and underbrush merge, forming strange shapes. Not a single insect makes a sound.
Night becomes an entity— a being. We observe each other for a single inhalation and exhalation, maybe two.
A few stars make their entrance, pulse between leaves, move imperceptibly against the ancient sky.
Golden Goblin
The “Golden Goblin” pampas grass masses in mounds that bring to mind the piles of straw in “Rumpelstiltskin.”
And “Silver Feather” maiden grass winks in the sunlight, tawny and mystical, bestowing enchantment.
Crowds of weary black-eyed Susans stare, a thousand blinking eyes from out their withered ruffs. And lemon-colored coleus rise as big as bushes.
Pears ripen and fall rotten to the ground. Breathe deeply and smell the mix, the fruit and flowers climaxing all about. Breathe again and find the hidden scent of summer decay.
The breeze stirs the atmosphere; it’s been so quiet. Something trembles within the stems and aging leaves, ancient and as old as myth, and lets me spy it for an instant.
The Mikweed Pod Lovers
FOR GEORGE MACDONALD
They met when the pods were new, tender and ready to eat, foraging at the edge of the woods.
She had been there earlier, when the shoots and leaves were young and sweet. Her family considered them a delicacy, a tasty treat.
Now the stalks were strong and tall, and she felt as diminutive as Alice grown too small.
She stepped into the milkweed forest, grown so high, and heard a rustle as the upper pods swayed against the sky.
He was on a ladder of twigs and maybe two years older, his back to her, reaching up, a sack slung over his shoulder.
(poem continues . . . )
IN HONOR OF T.S. ELIOT
