1 minute read
Russell Rowland
Leaf-Peepers
Tour busses passing rock our Corolla, sweet chariot, as it swings low along the road to glory. Pilgrims seek the place we live, where in autumn the Holy City comes down like a bride adorned for her husband.
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If we squint, we can even see a parable in those swamp maples circling the wetlands with heatless fire, oaks aflame that don’t stop burning just because the day ends early.
It is as if someone found a treasure hidden in the hills, covered it up, then went and sold everything in order to own the hills.
Long coaches leave southward with photos that freeze a frame. We stay to watch the relinquishment and the sweeping-away, the stealing from tentative saplings that have little, that little that they have—
see it through to November and beyond, as we see children grow up and take our love with them, parent and grandparent mistake us in the aging of their minds. Grandpa would be stacking firewood now.
Russell Rowland
Leaving No Trace
Wet on the trail. My boot-prints fill in quickly and fade—like all memory of my passing, from the preoccupations of red-eyed vireo, furtive fox.
Certain walkers of the world’s woods leave things behind they shouldn’t. Others possibly something good— for the forest, for what live in trees and burrows, for visitors of my sort.
A waddling porcupine doesn’t need to know your brand of takeout coffee.
Neither do nestling and mother bird have to eat seed from the human hand to feel my love of singers, flutterers.
Love that would not intrude might have prolonged a song, left feathers unruffled—but didn’t insist on the tune, or call a fledgling down from where God sits in the sky.
