Yahara Winter

"This way the dust, that way the dust.
I listen to both sides
But I keep right on.
I remember the leaves sitting in judgement
And then winter."
– W.S. Merwin, "Air"







There is the forest of Clark County
that I pass by winding road
it is early February and a recent snow
has turned the floor of the world
to a crystal fabric, dry and light.
The woods have been recently thinned.
Old lodgepole pines stand now
without limbs or their own drawn
fabrics of green that have draped
their rising bodies for how many years.
I keep moving, but also stop and wander,
as we do with all things from car
at forty miles per hour, warm by heater,
and move in among the new briars
that circle around tall stacks of lumber
like the razor spiral fences
we see in movie war zones.
It had been the simplest of measures
for the drivers of mechanical saws to lift
that giant crane by nothing but a finger
and erased the limbs by a flick as if shaving.
The leaping squirrels and dashing whitetail
can now see a thousand yards past
those old stands of tented trees
into all the danger that was once hid.