Rosemary Dunn Moeller

Rosemary Dunn Moeller

Holding Firmer by Roots Through Her Trunk

She crashed down on oak leafed ground, stayed a long, long while before deciding to die, made sounds whether or not humans heard. Ripped by winds and weakened by rains this forty tall white oak declined. Roots had grown around large rocks underground pulling them into the light, holding them close. Roots, just naked branches, bark-less, had stretched slowly, pushing through sand and soil, searching like water witches, tunneling like miners for real wealth, dried out by salted breezes, sun-burnt, withered, fell off. All else gave up, blew away.

But three twigs sought sun, their own roots from mother bark cloned, created to pierce the dying trunk, speared ground below, slowly pushing through xylem and phloem, growing upward as mother had before, smooth barked, leafed, now tall and thick, held firmer by roots through the old one. The sun-side trunk lived long enough, twigs realigned their destiny with gravity, and re-created.

Rosemary Dunn Moeller

Ode to an Oriole

Your feet and claws, nothing like my needles, your beak doesn’t resemble my crochet hook, but your nest reminds me of my knitted blanket I spent months on. In less time, you completed an avian opus, hanging from a branch, of strength and flexibility, outside my porch.

I couldn’t have learned from others unless some wise woman once watched your techniques, skill and determination. I may be driven by the same instincts to warm my babies, soften my home with fibers, where we sit and observe what we don’t understand: the maple your mate selected, neighborhood near fruit and an insect supermarket, trees and waters acceptable to both of us.

And we do our thing with moss and grass outdoors, fibers and fabrics inside, until satisfied for a season.

My hands are taught by your feet and beak, in active meditation on what warms and protects. We, too, migrate to be closer to the salty ocean in winter, then return to produce what we must, on slightly wooded plains in sun and warm summer breezes, waiting for our creative knotting to wear out and be replaced by more, and more.

Rosemary Dunn Moeller

Time Curves

Winter plumage confuses identification. Loons, with their cry that bows the soul’s strings, transform from the most elegant feathering: black head, neck and dagger-beak, white throat band, checkered black and white markings on the back. They met and mated on inland lakes, nested and nurtured in one season that takes us a score of years, then transformed in parting to the coasts. They turn gray, beak to tail, all shadowed in shallows along the coasts, like rock stars who don Trapist Robes, vow celibacy, still singing the hours in beauty but hooded in meditative colorlessness. I gray too after decades of wild exploration to find one mate, settling onto land and raising our brood, in our own nest we built. But my time is linear, my living headed towards shadows. Loons live my life annually, shed the gray feathers, polish the beak that blackens brilliantly, ready for breeding again in the Spring. They return home, flying above the curvature of earth, start over with mates, breed, build, nest and nourish. I have no more eggs to roll down tubes, ready to meet the wiggling other half of our humanity. But I keep my mate as I’m kept. We travel through time linearly, growing more alike as we age. Loons live a spiral existence, variations on a percussive rhythm that generates seasonally. Gray to brilliance, to gray to brilliance.