Arboretum Diary

"I stood a while, listening to the small sounds of the woods and looking at the stars. After excitement we are so restful. When the thumb of fear lifts, we are so alive." – Mary Oliver, from "May"







5/27


Along Greene's Prairie, the slender boardwalk at stretches slumping below the muck line, golden circuits and blue diodes appeared from out of the fountains of sleepy sedges. The flitting of the goldfinch, rustling in the marsh alders, then off – a dash – became loud to the eye as if a projection of the Hoary Puccoon, its petals 5, illuminated like golden signals roaming for its source in the sky.  Bluet sparks rose out of the grassy circuits. On their way up, they longed to flight but held there suspended steady by the electric green tubes.  I stood now no longer moving. As I looked around the prairie I saw that the world is a light show. Where a single crane slipped through the whorl of the scene, it was the absence of blue that made the slow flap of wings remarkable.  The honk of two geese broke the static and drifted low just long enough to wake the tussock.