I’ve sat on a bare-damp chair.
out on the North deck
where the moss blurs the lines
between itself and algae and lichen
and me. Me, who wouldn’t know such a line
if it were less blurred...I’m not so sharp as all that.
I set my glasses down on a stone table.
Beside the cold-soon tea.
I watch the wind coming, first through the reeds.
And then shifting the banana leaves.
And soon the birch curtain crowding out my
writing place. My righting place.
The labyrinth is hosting some flowers. A dragonfly alights on an altar of crystal
and stone and birch branch. And offerings.
The dragonflies seems to (me to) re-write spider lines
or maybe ley lines. A frog just leaped from a tree past my feet.
I’ve lost my word lines, my throughline.
This frog is now in the leaves by the ivy under the bees.
Looking so green. Leaf droppings dropping on its head.
It’s green head. Like an emerald in a mountain’s side.
Now a rustle. Just beyond. But not that far. Like feet away. But beyond.
Another distance. Another limit. Another world. A bank-robbery escape-mode
Squirrel is making off with what it made off with from the free-to-all and undefended
(and legal, too) pear tree in the far yard. It leaped upon the birch trunk and then, startled to find me unstartlingly well...just here. And unstartled. Paused to set its claws in bark.
It teeth gripping as fifth grip the rind of an unripe pear, its size, if I might compare,
the size of its head without the ears, without the hair. This unrepentant squirrel leaped from
here
to
there
all of which was over there but just there so basically here. (Just not here here, more there.) It found its place to contemplate me. To observe. It made no offer. But of itself. Which, really, is all that we can do. It chuffed a few times but it seemed to me that this was more to do with why-not-give-this-a-try-but-I-don’t-know-why. It’s belly flush to gray birch bark. It’s tail extended, and caught by a breeze that the leaves were not informed of. A deceiving breeze.
Soon - which wasn’t soon, it was minutes - the squirrel scrambled up the birch and branch-to-branched its way to overhead and then out of sight. I may have smelled of peanuts as I’d just emptied a jar. I may have been the deceiver. I may be the lone believer that I might know at all.
The frog hasn’t yet moved.
Something is buzz-whistling. In the grass? The trees? The soil? The sound rises and the tone
shifts. The pitch lifts. I cannot say if it is insect. I cannot say if it is amphibian. I cannot say if it is electric and thus man and thus unwelcome. Cicada? Frogs? A hummingbird just fooled me into thinking I knew something about speed. Something about color. Something about birds.
Something about Nature. Something about need. Something about life. Something about something about my self. A partial-second lesson. The teacher came and went. The teachings stayed behind in mind. I have so much work to do.
The far birch, placed in the yard for a long-ago dog
seems to offer up a peach harvest this year.
(At least when my glasses are off.)
The landscaper says that all the birches are yellowing this summer
this year this near to the midsummer and this far from the far flung
and far colder cold slumber of December and November and October.
The blue spruce has a still-for-the-first-time-this-season small flock
of oriole. Or sunset-breasted, warbler wren throated tipped somethings.
I count seven. Or six. No, eight. Wait. Nine. Uh, now eight.
Oh, there’s one! Oh, no matter. There’s some.
Too flighty and flittery each blur-glance I’ve had all year. And I've tried each time
to secure them (sharply) in my lens.
The ducks converse as they arrive at the pond’s far edge. About to traverse the
turtle-hiding waters, the en-flowered pond’s surface, the distance between heard and seen.
I reach for my glasses. The birch leaves in yellow have fallen and lied. Belied to believed.
There are no birds in the tree. That I can see. That I care to see. Autumn come early.
A hawk glides past my edge-of-can’t-quite-see. It’s loping-like arc its own pleasure...to me.
And, I imagine, it. The meadow is blushing in purple, ironweed. The jewelweed, too is a star-field of twinkling orange. A constellation by day. A bowl by the winter-blooming something (jasmine?) is concentrically coming awake as drip drip drippings are drop drop dropping. A yellow-spiked caterpillar treks through the detritus of the unkempt bits of the beside-the-garden which isn’t so much a garden as a place I once planted and once planned. A spider fast-ropes down to investigate and, as it happens, to pester. The caterpillar twists and tumbles. Righting itself, it plods on in its stretch-curl way as the spider ascends to the invisible upper home in its way. The frog hasn’t moved but I notice and note its **** has two bumps. Like its bulbous eyes in its front which, as I notice and note is spear-shaped as is its hind. I wonder at defenses. It is still. It still is still. It’s stillness is still stilling. Until...I move on. My fastest is not footed but mindful. Not mindful but of mind. I am of a mind to move the mind along. The caterpillar closes the distance. What a distance to it it must be. It’s face is black as an undersea shadow. It has spikier spikes of black here and there. Likely in some pattern but my mind has moved and so, here and there it will be. My story. My pattern. My refusal to change.
The mushrooms where the spider met the yellow fellow, though. Sesame-seeded. Decorated. Pimpled. Bejeweled. A tawny cup beside a stone behind the frog. Soft mustard-dotted. But now! A new frog where the old new frog had been. This one a leopard toad. I think. (I shouldn’t think.) Browns upon browns with stripes and blots and dots. Tans and browns. At the end of the birch twig is now the first frog. The green-headed bumpy-butted one. The leopard in tiger lily patches watches the caterpillar (a different one?) clamber though the unswept unkempt.
The frog, beside me in ceramic keeps time for the timeless. The throat bellowing. As though feeding a fire somewhere where Earth is turned to plow. We all make our own ends, don’t we?