When we walk past themthey always announce their sculptured elegance—
the soft foliage hanging along the lengthsof their stately branches,
which blend into a finely contoured greenery,their nodding nibs gilt-tipped.
But it is in this lavish mixtureof color and shape that make them
emblematic of what is conifer—that suchness blowing on the wind,
their sheer pineyness, their svelte lushness.In their substantive shape,
every evening, we long to hear them whisper to us about what love is and its constancy.
How they can uphold themselves in such silenceall together in a row, how they provide a way
for small flocks of chickadees and juncos, amid their shadows, to quickly dart and follow.
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Why you are called red-bellied is counterintuitive, since it is your head that is
streaked with a band of crimson; and it is that which I first saw rounding the trunk
of the shagbark while I stood motionless as a stone . . . just looking at the summer
horizon, morning cumulous blown through the sky below the coolness and the dew.
Your low guttural annoyance issuing from your throat upon seeing me ceased,
since you were able to sense I would do you no harm— still as I was, and distant
enough, being a few steps away, so I could study you: claws scratching the upturned
cantilevered sections of bark, wearing your crosshatch black and white back feathers
like a camouflage tuxedo, beak darting between each bark layer until you seized the prize
of finding a long earwig within a crevice, squirming at the tip of your nib, but lodged there
firmly, before adjusting yourself, and, in a start, leaping up into flight with fare for your
nest of chicks. How you have fulfilled me by my just having seen you hitch around
a tree, and upon take-off, undulate through the air to bask in your woodsy ways.
.JPG)
