thick rough trunk, transitioning to smooth

greenish white, powdery

left my hands, arms, hair, clothes with

poplar family sour musk

rich green leaves, smooth and thick as

bookbinder’s leather

fell, a golden clatter in the autumn

dark canker wounds

where swollen black aphids bred

seeped acrid sap

colored rich brown of linseed oil

when it blew down

(the trunk shattered, a man’s chest high

a mass of debris

limbs and leaves stretching across the yard

outside the kitchen window)

kestrels fledged chicks there from a

confiscated starling nest

whose five blue eggs lay orphaned beneath

a new nest, a mat of grass

mirrored with the kestrel’s own five eggs

freckled and flushed

one drowned in the trough,

an enameled cast-iron tub where red worms

and mosquitoes wriggled

pulling the young bird from the water

puffy eyed, pallid skinned

a macerated lump of feather and flesh

made me witness to indignity

an abbreviation to which I was impotent

another, hissing, wings spread, belly to soil

was caught on the ground

we three boys surrounded it armored

with railroad gloves

scooped its light body, caught wings to breast

looked into its eyes

and could read nothing that was there

but a stone hardness

mediated by leather, each wanted to touch it

hold it like a spring

feel it like a willow limb, a mouse trap

a raised hammer

releasing a bird is an act of subversion

delicate nonchalant gesture

cupped hands raised, opened, gravity is broken

all those that lived, I think came looking for their home

it was gone, sawed into rounds, bark gnawed by horses

and the birds drifted their own directions

on individual trajectories of personal inertia

Reading, like speech, is an ancient, preliterate craft. We read the tracks and scat of animals, the depth and luster of their coats, the set of their ears and the gait of their limbs. We read the horns of sheep, the teeth of horses. We read the weights and measures of the wind, the flight of birds, the surface of the sea, snow, fossils, broken rocks, the growth of shrubs and trees and lichens. We also read, of course, the voices that we hear. We read the speech of jays, ravens, hawks, frogs, wolves, and, in infinite detail, the voices, faces, gestures, coughs and postures of other human beings. This is a serious kind of reading, and it antedates all but the earliest, most involuntary writing, which is the leaving of prints and traces, the making of tracks.
-Robert Bringhurst

“What we call our power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” -- C. S. Lewis

...we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?

--Thoreau

Fight to save a sea-gull's wings:

That would be a sacred war.

--Robinson Jeffers

There's an art of attending to weather, to the route you take, to the land's marks along the way, to how if you turn around you can see how different the journey back looks from the journey out, to reading the sun and moon and stars to orient yourself, to the direction of running water, to the thousand things that make the wild a text that can be read by the literate. The lost are often illiterate in this language that is the language of the earth itself, or don't stop to read it.

--Rebecca Solnit

ALL THE WORM TRAILS UNDERNEATH THE BARK

OF A GIANT FOREST

write a name in a script

I cannot translate.

And I do not care to.

--Michael McClure