One More Part
of Our Watershed

"Our old truck too, slow down the street,
out of the past–
It's all so old – the hawk, the houses, the trucks,
the view the fog–
Midwinter late sun flashes though hilltops and trees
a good day, we know one more part of our watershed..."
– Synder, from "So Old"







We haven't been here long this morning.
Just arrived. Can hear the highway
from a quarter mile away.

What'd the old settlers have in mind
here at Juniper Knoll?
Not far off from Leopold's Arboretum workshack–
his old work table still in there pungent
of bootdirt and old feathers
windows looking out over
Gallistel Woods, that mixed and strangled
thicket, bittersweet snaking up every trunk –
but here, at the knoll, little berm,
Junipers leafless all the way up to the crippled crowns
would never thrive in rocky sandy soil.

Fill up the truck with loppers,
those little flip out saws bent at the handle
for buckthorn and the occasional thorny castor,
fill up the boxes with floppy work gloves
and warmed up water for tea and chocolate.

Sun layers down in between the plantings,
microscopes across the ridges of ice crystals
where the dirt road mud has all hardened
like ripples of sea waves,
white and jeweled at the edges and so temporary
that you have to get down on a denim knee
to see the surprise of early morning frost.
So this is how the real world lives.

Three cranes right along the trail at Curtis
early autumn had hobbled forward
on thin legs as if a cadre of farmers with hands
clutched behind their backs inspecting rows.
Last owl perched up there still as a clock.
On the ledge of the manufactured savannah,
quizzical deer poking noses into the brush
flapping spirited tails in love with shadows.

It was Leopold
who just about died when the city said
sure as hell the highway would be built.
He planted a row of towering pines
to block it all out but the noise.

I pull red vines out from under soggy leaves.