it feels good today to stroll, then hard hike up the valley,
shaking loose the lethargy in my muscles and psyche,
the forest before me washed by last night’s storms,
drop after drop still on the branches like tiny ornaments
who every once in a while rainbow the sun,
who wakes up both himself and us
with a clarity yesterday’s grey just didn’t have,
only a few flowers, small yellow violets and clumps of grass,
have ventured out, plus the red of early maple,
I see signs of the show readying itself
in tiny budding yellow trillium and mats of tiny trout lily leaves,
bears at a memory and a hope,
I hear wild turkeys and see none,
the walled spring I love to visit,
the only one of its kind I know of,
has dropped rock after rock into itself from above,
as if a century of holding is enough,
the great beech above the cabin
that I’ve know all my life, like a grandparent,
drops even more branches that it can’t sustain,
the rot at the base about halfway around the trunk,
in these poems I often look for a moral at this point,
a distillation of experience now as a way to let me pause
and work to understand just how what I am
mirrors the world or finds himself going against the grain,
or maybe who I know now knows himself as a subset of the human,
with no grounding in the rhythm methods of the world,
even though I only sort of notice,
I write these words while letting the rain-fed creek
rush its truth below me,
while I struggle to understand my own truth.
by Henry Walker
March 1, ’12
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