Nature
Lunch at Loon
A pair of adult loons and their young ones habitated the small lake near my campsite over the 4th. In the evening and morning they have an eerie mournful wail that travels across the water like the song of ghosts.
#19
On my camping trip over the fourth of July I was surprised to find a herd of cows on the climb up to our campground near the small town of Republic in eastern Washington state.The number 19 refers to the ear tag.
Climbing to nearly 4000 feet and negotiating a winding heavily wooded road the bovines were an unexpected and entertaining surprise.
A Tree Falls
I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow
to keep an appointment with a beech-tree,
or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
– Henry David Thoreau, 1817 – 1862
The Stone Lizard
The waterfalls are real. All night it rained
On black rocks where eels
Slither and cling for centuries
Out there in the black hills.
or the lizards in the poem of that name:
Lizards are kin and can return to stone
At will. Transfixing a shield
Like a spear a lizard froze in the sun, a thing
Of bronze, yet quick. See the dart of his tongue!
excerpt ‘Rain’
by David Campbell
Fly United
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Your lungs fill & spread themselves, wings of pink blood, and your bones empty themselves and become hollow. When you breathe in you’ll lift like a balloon and your heart is light too & huge, beating with pure joy, pure helium. The sun’s white winds blow through you, there’s nothing above you, you see the earth now as an oval jewel, radiant & seablue with love. It’s only in dreams you can do this. Waking, your heart is a shaken fist, a fine dust clogs the air you breathe in; the sun’s a hot copper weight pressing straight down on the think pink rind of your skull. It’s always the moment just before gunshot. You try & try to rise but you cannot. |
Snowgeese, Fir Island Washington,USA
And so goes the winter inundation of snowgeese dotting the fields of Fir Island in a winter spectacle that never ceases to amaze.