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Wildsong
Edited by John Daniel
Desire
Once, walking in the woods,
I met a hunter.
He spoke. I stopped.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have.
But he didn’t touch me.
He only
said I moved fast, asked
if I wanted to lead his dogs.
This is not to say
he let me get away.
Ever since, I have dreamed
of running among hounds.
As we slip through the leaves,
the leathery touch of laurel,
the dogs narrow
in the nose and shoulders, grow
into wolves. I go wild too,
and disappear into the trees.
I become why
dogs howl at the forest’s edge,
and you wake at night,
and you say, It’s nothing.
Rose McLarney
Marshall, North Carolina
www.wilderness.org
Leaf, Bird, Tree
Leaf—quilled pen
writing
spirals in air
Its weighted stem
making of papery skin
a wing
Those other wings
blown upward
from every limb—bird
flock rises
still clustered as if
memory of the tree
shaped
its lifts and turns
in the brightening sky
They whirl and vanish
together
down the windfilled clouds
leaving the tree
bare
of leaf and bird
in its own
slow spiraling
between earth and sky
Robin Chapman
Madison, Wisconsin
Nest Site
—Mount St. Helens, Willow Flycatcher
Below her steaming dome,
a nest of dead stems
cups two hatchlings, blind wobblers
among bits of shell. Even the way
their willow sways above trickles
of snowmelt cannot make them
less unlikely, scruffy lumplings
slated to unlock their wings and sew
this air of ours, this gray land
we call blast zone. If there is an aim
to their snaps and sallies, their kind
of fletched breath, look for it
in skin-shut eyes flushed with life,
in the way a child keeps from sleep
as long as she can, cupping a flashlight
for the bloody glow of her hand.
Derek Sheffield
Leavenworth, Washington
Song For The Unseen
We, enamored of all things grand,
of mountains, towers, gods whose mouths
once sang rock and water awake,
of time uncountable, colossal ships
ploughing through gigantic oceans,
we ought to regard the new green leaf,
fashioned in spring of one small tree,
fashioned of land teeming with beings
whose microscopic eating feeds the tree
which feeds the air through its own breathing,
and by that breath not just the small survive.
Christine Colasurdo
Portland, Oregon
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