Goose Pond

"Tired of holding back all winter long, the trees suddenly feel they've been had. They can't stand it anymore: they release their verbiage, a flood, a vomit of green. They try to achieve a complete foliage of verbiage." – Francis Ponge, from "A Cycle of Seasons"







Only the true soldier of love for the outdoor world will continue to walk through these beige and dessiccated pastures of early spring marshland. The cattails and the reeds that create the scenery here are so brittle and so colorless, that we have to feel some apology to the otter who has been crossing the pond back and forth and nosing into the sharp foliage for cover. What a dullness! Surrounding out at its edges, as sort of masters of the colorlessness, the tangled oaks, revealed now for what they are, castles of random dark and twisted corridors unlit by torches of the leaves and a thousand small cliffs, watch over the scene at this season something like prison guards. It is not a sadness. It is more of a nothingness, a stark anti-memory, which, when followed along inside the imagination, become something more of a what we soon hope it will be, wild green, yellow blots, petals of twenty wildflowers, orange, indigo, violet, all blazes and depth soft as tongues. There is, however, one old performer that steals the easy scene – the pond itself, which has molted its gray flat jacket of ice some weeks ago and turned, in among the shameless colorlessness of the marsh, a deep cool blue which reflects the dome of sky blue itself and we see that perhaps they are looking at each other, mirrors, and offer wonders. The Canada geese have landed here and move around randomly to plunge and feed. This is the only life. These mammoth birds who are never heartbroken paddle on against a stiff breeze that shakes the dull grass against the water edges. They move through their parade of gestures like an entourage to a queen, honking at our approach, raising wild wings, even staring us down, as if taking over the scene from tar black oaks. Under our feet the seeds are rumbling at every blade of grass; small planets shaking, yes, but still, and when they come there will not be much to say. The old guards of the pond – otter, goose, oaks, cattail reeds – will sink slowly to the background where the belong. An exuberance of color speak to each other all day long. Songbirds do not know how to stop, their small red hearts like rose petals, tying ribbons of music along the trunks of old oaks.