Sonnet 924
“A Walk In April Woods”
Its a year since Lucy walked this trail with me
And a lot can happen and she sees it too
Close up on four feet instead of two
“That cedar must have barber-chaired in a winter storm
And brought down a cottonwood with it in the fall
And the path goes under it not around” I say,
So I let her choose the way,
And we don't linger long
Under so many tons of history
There's a patch of trillium and Easter lily
In a slant of sun through the canopy
Then pale Indian pipes in the shade and dew
With stinging nettletops purplegreen
Ready for picking but only with gloves and care
And then a cluster of hanging alder and maple I have to clear
That bowed and broke, lost out in the race to live in sun
Like drunken sailors caught forever by a leeward wind
A pigeontoed bear trail crosses our pilgrim's way
And Lucy gives a perfunctory bark and sniff
But the scent isn't new and anyway she's used to it
While high above in the impossible blue
A pair of redtailed hawks perform a mating minuet
We enter a grove of young cedars colonizing the gap a widowmaker left
Yellow pollen clouds explode at every brush of paw and head
From questing fingers that stroke the air
But in deep moss I see a strand of rusting wire
And then a row of horizontal posts becoming earth again
They remind me of the farmer in Dunsmuir's time
Who got this place under the Homestead Act
I found him buried in a government file like his old fence
On a deed: “Twenty acres more or less” in flowing longhand
(Although it was really twenty-two) when accuracy wasn't worth the find
While underfoot salaal reclaims the floor and jealous swordfern's close behind
With fronds crookbent from snow and flowering ironwood's next I know
Since we two last tried to assert our position
But only for a bodywidth through these April woods
'Cause its important to Lucy and me that here at least Nature is still the rule
By John Edwards