the artist starts to work

 tentative spring, close to enthusiastic

three months have worked upon the mountains

since I last visited them,

so the transformation of tentative spring

feels like an artist just started to work,

the austere canvas of winter’s sketch

now intricately dabbed with budding color:

the purple extravagance of redbuds,

the white puffs of the “sarvis” on the slopes,

the reds and golds maple and oak start to remember,

the small pointed leaves of the dogwood

are almost to the size of squirrels’ ears,

so oldtimers would say we could plant corn soon,

rain has come through and sat upon the mountains,

the grass and yellow trillium look luxuriant,

and the creek is loud and white, though clear,

for above us, 

root and leaf have been left well enough alone

so they hold the soil,

so they hold against the leveling  toward the sea

water lives in its soul as it laughs in submission

to the call of the totality 

the Earth holes in the universe,

I continue to want to learn 

from the powers that were old

before people came to be,

I love our moral stories,

but I love first the elemental stories

of rock and water, of plant and animal, 

before I get lost in what I see reflected from the water,

I want to see into it, to see before it, beyond it,

how can I be a master

until I finish my apprenticeship?

the next morning we foray up the valleys

where cove hardwood still remembers great trees

with trunks reaching toward the sky

and an interconnected web of community below our feet,

and, between those levels, the ephemerals of early spring

race to flower and seed while the way is open,

before the canopy above returns to capture the Sun,

we feel like we are visiting a preschool

with thousands of flower children laughing 

and enjoying each other and each moment:

yellow and white trillium,

beds of May apple and squirrel corn and fringed phacelia,

foam flowers, miterwort, violets everywhere,

bloodroot just past flower, wild ginger just coming into flower,

all of them so like fairies,

as if just born,

and also ancient beyond our reckoning.

by Henry H. Walker

April 1, ‘21