Two Poems
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Let me speak with a tongue of leaves,
guide you by tremor of whisker
to the hillside tumbling toward water
where a single lady slipper orchid
spread her pink skirts above the dark soil
that one remarkable spring.
With a whiff of scent, you can find
the fallen maple that cracked and crashed
in the storm eighteen winters ago. We can
use the bole as a compass to point
to the glade by the river where the cliff side
leans and threatens the evening
but shelters six different velvets of moss.
Let me feel the earth like a root, finding wetness
by touch and by thirst, dividing itself
into pathways and pathways, let me
speak in a language of beechdrops and thorns,
borrow from bats and know patterns of branches
criss-crossing the stars as echoes, build my brain
anew with magnets implanted so I know
the tug of each pole in my sleep,
in my feet, feel always the hum of the stone.
Bog
is nothing like Meadow,
Mother Nature’s perky Avon lady
flashing her lipstick blossoms for bees.
Bog hums along with cicadas, weaves
cranberry vines through her tousled
cottongrass hair, brews Labrador tea
for one in her dilapidated house
down in the tangled hollow.
Born from glacier, Bog remembers
the creak and crush of ice, grows
poison sumac on her undulating lawn
for its bright red stems, rises early
to set insect snares: sundews sparkle
with sticky pink droplets, pitcher plants
open silver-haired lips into curved
green throats. Evenings, Bog rocks
in the blue shadow of her porch
while her fence of fir trees leans round
her kettle, reflecting like bristling arrows.
Bog never throws anything away
so gray-green feathers of moss pile up
like old magazines. Rumors are she keeps
bodies in the basement. Her only friends
are Salt Marsh and Mangrove, too busy
holding back storm surge to visit. Mosquitoes
discourage the curious, bullfrogs keep
watch at the waterline while their eggs twirl
like glass planets in peat-dark galaxies.
Bog asks nothing except not to be drained, filled,
wished into cornfield or mountaintop. She is
no garden of beauties minding their manners,
blushing at a yellowed leaf. She is alive in soil
that would suffocate rose roots, she never begs
for nitrogen, she is the witch you cannot burn,
she is the old crone in the fairy tale who knocks
on your door for a drink of water
and she rewards those who fill her cup.
