Showing all posts by ronhenry

Cynical the human view of this land manifestly
our land now aside from there being so much yellow 

now telling the story of life spreading its greenly
but imperfectly formed self around and above my ear

if sky can be blue and carry itself as well
as one might expect a medium to, the clusters of asters
in the culverts are constellations needing
no name, just listening to birdsong with an unpracticed ear

an aspiring but wholly amateur translator, I know
so little about the languages I’m listening so hard to,
still I grow to believe there is method in chaotic improvisation of
mockingbird, the changeable pattern of calls from

crows on station in treetops, jay’s rusty-pulley shriek cutting
through morning, or the forlorn cheep of hungry finch on branch.

We wind our way down to the lakeside as dusk begins to fall, looking
for signs in the sky the tv and internet experts have told us to expect. First we stop 

by the reformed temple out in the country, unsure where exactly to look
among the usual dazzle and emerging disarray of distant suns, of vague 

glow from nearby towns and the last of the set sun, except I did study
several sky maps before we set out so I should have an idea where to find 

that smudge. Then farther down to the park by the shore. The last of the sunset,
a blue somehow full of peach and tan, makes the water bright as if from within. 

Those experts told us that astronomers told us not actually to expect much, even as
they published beautiful professional long-exposure photographs of the thing 

in all its horse-tailed glory, multi-limbed complexity of dust and ion, great chunk of ice
backing its way out of the solar system faster than any thing any of us has ever known, 

into a lightless void we think oh sure we can imagine — we’ve all blindly
walked into a nightstand getting up to pee in the night, eyes full of darkness, right? —

but which, no, no, we shouldn’t kid ourselves, is so much more deeply, darkly, alien, and alone.

A half-mile walk in the direction not-toward-the-mall, the suburban homes
give way to open fields full of noisy blackbirds and jays. Here the buttercups
have gone wild like undergrads at the beach ignoring social distancing
and glorying foolishly in their own youth. Masked, and walking the length
of one field’s heavily weathered split rail fence here and there hold together
with baling wire, I take a couple snaps with my phone that completely lose
the glory of the yellow. It’s a bit like trying to take a picture at night of
the profusion that is the Milky Way and getting vague and underexposed gray
instead of the 400 billion strewn diamonds. Farther on, where the road turns
sharply north, I turn back to look over the way I have come: the view goes far
as the ridge on the other shore of the lake, then farther to the notch in the ridge
to the south that’s the valley where a thousand years ago the Tutelo people
lived until soldiers of the very young America’s Revolutionary Army killed them
on the orders of the father of our country. Quite a view from here, really.