Ice-bound On The Way To The Morning Star \ Hardhack And Hackmatack

Nancy:  January’s short dark days and long nights leave the door open to memories of places long unseen, memories rich in detail building on one another.

Ice-bound On The Way To The Morning Star

No one ever said, pack everything, but I did:

bluegills and hollyhocks and the jackknife I carried

in fourth grade, an eagle feather and a month’s worth

of old hymns and the soft sound of turtles leaving

a log for pale water,

And so, when the sun drifts south and the color

seeps out of the marsh and the ice tightens,

this is what I do: I unpack what I need,

sometimes singing in the dark, sometimes unwrapping

a day of sweet mud and woodsmoke, always

Needing what I find: it could be

grits, axe handles, the white stars

of puccoon, or it could be

the page that says favorable winds

bright sky to the east

red cliffs and the precious water

of Santa Elena canyon

(in boxes still to be opened: fossils,

old valentines, the page that says sunrise:

headed home.)

Alan:  What we do will be erased soon enough, if not quite completely.  Like those who came before, we too will leave faint signs that others may some day try to read.

     Hardhack is a common name for Spirea; very descriptive if you're trying to clear it by hand.  Hackmatack is what people in this area call tamarack or American larch.

Hardhack And Hackmatack

Hardhack and hackmatack, spruce and fir;

chokeberry, chokecherry, bramble, thorn;

water where you don’t want it, ledge where you do.

Thirty years mowing and thirty years growing:

the trees watch their children hidden in the grass.

Where cows puddled the clay soil, alders followed.

Where sheep wandered the cleared land, wire lies down.

Hundred-year-old fence wire, found by the feet

at the head of a gulley or above the bay –

running now under the roots of the spruces.

On the hill slope there must have been a woodlot.

After the fire of ’57, it all came back birches.

Dead snags still hugged the skyline in the ‘80s –

we watched an osprey perch there, tearing a fish.

Last time I climbed: snags fallen; young softwoods.

Rectangles of field stones show under the turf.

Bricks – an old chimney – under the spade.

Liniment bottles, bits of rusted stove.

Our house needs work.  There’s no foundation.

Just an  old cellar hole, slumped in and muddy.

Thirty years mowing and thirty years growing:

once we’re gone, the trees will own the fields.