POEMS/ Falling Time
Falling Time
We fatten for the cold, the way the swarms
of goldfinches empty our feeders each day,
the way the bears are tearing apples from the high
branches in the old orchard to stuff the flesh
beneath their fur for the empty months. We stock
our freezer, our pantry, barricades against
those icy roads, those drifts of snow to come,
when we stay in and hibernate until the melt and mud.
We stack our woodpile like beavers who pile
sticks deep below the surface in their ponds
to feed their winter home below the ice.
Last stragglers to board the waiting bus,
the oak leaves are hanging on, and soon only
the persistent beeches, branches still full
in early March, will remain, as if they were
the stubborn elders we’re becoming, clinging
to life, determined not to fall. The carmine
red of the swamp maples, yellowing
sedge, rusty tinges on the marsh grass,
are painted anew each year on our minds’
canvas, unfading until time slows
and our weary pulse slows, staggers, stops.
Falling Time appears in the Winter 2014 edition of Avocet, A Journal of Nature Poems
We fatten for the cold, the way the swarms
of goldfinches empty our feeders each day,
the way the bears are tearing apples from the high
branches in the old orchard to stuff the flesh
beneath their fur for the empty months. We stock
our freezer, our pantry, barricades against
those icy roads, those drifts of snow to come,
when we stay in and hibernate until the melt and mud.
We stack our woodpile like beavers who pile
sticks deep below the surface in their ponds
to feed their winter home below the ice.
Last stragglers to board the waiting bus,
the oak leaves are hanging on, and soon only
the persistent beeches, branches still full
in early March, will remain, as if they were
the stubborn elders we’re becoming, clinging
to life, determined not to fall. The carmine
red of the swamp maples, yellowing
sedge, rusty tinges on the marsh grass,
are painted anew each year on our minds’
canvas, unfading until time slows
and our weary pulse slows, staggers, stops.
Falling Time appears in the Winter 2014 edition of Avocet, A Journal of Nature Poems