My feet moving through leaves the only sound
for miles, the forest fundamentally changed,
unrecognizable with every leaf gone, fallen.
Only tree trunks, branches everywhere, layer upon layer upon
layer—beech, cherry, yellow and white
birch, spruce—topography newly revealed
now too. Far off where I could not look in summer,
a knoll, a big stand of spruce, and I can’t resist
bushwhacking up there, finally feeling the soft-quiet of
the brown-dead pine needle floor under foot, looking straight
up at the big still-green swaying branches, the wind whooshing
through now so different than when it pushes against
leaves, everything wholly new now and somehow unchanged, even
the stream flowing beneath the dilapidated bridge
pilings seems changed though still somehow the same
black slick motion breaking through the broken
branches of the abandoned beaver dam, louder
now with the muting effect of leaves gone, every sound
carrying out into the distance, especially the harsh
scratching of my feet through leaves.
I pause, lean against the gray-cold trunk of a beech twice
as wide as me, which I could not reach my arms around
if I tried. It leans against, has grown around, a big spruce,
and both of these lean out over the gray-black surface of the lake
like two embracing, trying not to fall. And I am falling again into the arms
of another mid-November Adirondack day, the only one for miles
and miles all around, the only one here to hear anything at all.
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You took me on your walk with you, Arnie:)
Beautiful!
Prose to poetry- you handle them both with organic grace, with the cycle of nature a leitmotif. So well done.