Wilderness Interface Zone

(for James)

When the little girls on the playground
threatened the boys with a kissing,
and they, slick with danger, ran
like wry hares, he made short work of it,
got ready his cheeks, mistook a step.

Now such generosity is lost on them,
his awkwardness thought sabotage,
and untimely glances which have
followed him since loving boyhood
turned like Actaeon’s hounds.

It has been harder game for all
since the older, changed child gave out,
golden, the new rule: each should turn,
by moments, hare, hound, hare.
It’s a bad curse with two cries.

He gives tongue to rough myth or shrieks
in briars as dreamed dogs bear down.

Still may the old knowing that grows
men’s hearts fix him on a bone,
his shape no more dissolve mid-step.
Old form shakes him like this, by the blood.
He comes from folk who once wived as wolves.

February is a big month on Wilderness Interface Zone.  First, in honor of Valentine’s Day, all month long we’ll be soliciting poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s) or other media that address the subject of love while including references to nature.  Also, we’re interested in works about nature that include references to love.  That’s a wide gamut.  Submissions may include original work or favorite works by others that have entered public domain.  So if you have a sonnet you’ve written to someone important–even and perhaps especially your dog–please consider sending it to WIZ.  See the submissions page in the navigation bar above.

Also, February 24th is WIZ’s birthday.  We’ll be one year old.  Yay!  If you have ideas about how to celebrate this important milestone, please e-mail your suggestions or offer them in the comments below.

Spring is definitely on the way.  February is a good month to warm things up.  Got love?  Publish it abroad.

In Virginia during the sixties and seventies, with a little concentrated looking, I could consort with eastern mud turtles, spotted turtles, elegant eastern painted turtles, snapping turtles, eastern box turtles, and even, I believe, although we lived rather east of its range as depicted in Petersen’s Eastern Reptiles and Amphibians, the occasional Terrapina ornata, the ornate box turtle. (more) »

Although Turtle is a trickster of the highest order, it is true also that Turtle may be tricked.  When this happens—when the trickster’s trickster is tricked—you may be sure the world has tipped out of balance.

Every year along the southeastern and gulf state coastlands of the U.S., females of several sea turtle species such as the loggerhead turtle, the green sea turtle, Ridley’s turtle, and the leatherback, their bellies full of eggs, approach land from the Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean, flapping through the water like short-billed birds.  Migrations begin in March and, one species following another, last through September (1). (more) »

On a warm Virginia day I walked to the Eastern Seaboard Coastline double tracks near our house and came to a small pond lying between the track grade and the woods.  A stand of wild irises grew in the water, along with rushes, green bubble-beaded algae, and sedges.  It was a small habitat not entirely suited for a water turtle, but I found one there—a five-inch spotted turtle who at sight of me dove into the water and scurried to bury himself in leaf litter at the puddle’s bottom. (more) »

Beside serving as the foundation of the world, Turtle surfaces in folk literature as the trickster’s trickster. It may surprise some to learn that Turtle has the smarts necessary to get the best of flimflammers like Jackal and even Anansi, the trickster spider, but then surprise is part of the strategy. (more) »

This is the first installment of a five-part post.

Always it’s the same: the woods are leaf-fatted, midsummer.  Low-growing Mayapple and ginseng creep among roots of massive white oaks whose limbs form their own green-clouded groves.  Ferns half my height unroll from fiddleheads.  Fiddleheads, with their scrolled fronds, put me in mind of unborn things—pale, web-footed, half-creatures in dark, damp places, curling over upon themselves. All around lies the litter of conversion, of life changing over to death, changing to seedbed, to mushroom clusters, to a pink shock of Lady’s-slipper orchid against decadent leaves. (more) »

Just as the deep snow here had melted to half-gone and I’d broken usable trails through the month-old snowpack remaining, a new storm blew in, dropped another five or six inches, and undid my hope for a winter thaw.  Two more storms over the next three days are expected to fluff things up even more.  While I work up the energy to go out and re-break trails—for myself and for animals, on whom this unnaturally long winter has been very stressful—I thought I’d try something different at WIZ to pass time.

Traditionally, haiku express insight into the movement of a season across the face of a landscape.  But since the form is of a meditative mind, its nature can be stretched to explore particulars of a variety of conditions.  In a recent conversation with greenfrog, topics of awareness and dishwashing flowed together.  The prospect of dishwashing haiku arose.  Well … and why not?

So for WIZ’s next winter while-away open invitation, the name is dishwashing (which I happen to find especially pleasant in wintertime); the game is haiku.

To begin:

Warm tap water, cool
Winter light pouring in streak
Plates in kitchen sync.

Let the One-liners begin.

I cannot kick a mound of maple leaves
or see a pumpkin peeking from the vine
before the frost and not remember hills
where summer laid her green. A distant line

of poplars gleams like curtains made of coins;
it shakes at passing clouds. And everywhere
the magpie hops, I see another sign
of hawthorns beckoning the winter air

to breathe upon the fields. It once was mine,
that sweet transition only autumn knows.
The one that holds the oak limbs silently,
embracing every chilly breeze that blows.

It leads me into mottled shadows of
a deeper hue, where nothing seems so true
as winter’s birth. Sometimes, I catch a glimpse
of it beneath the vines, when autumn’s through.

Saturday night, my husband and I made a last minute run to the only grocery store within 22 miles before it closed at 9 p.m.  On the return trip, I drove with the SUV’s highbeams on, because we live on a country road whereon we’re likely to come across animals on the pavement, everything from cats, rabbits, deer, mice and coyotes (toads in the summertime) to neighbors’ loose horses and cattle.

As we arced along a curve, the vehicle’s lights splashed against something moving on the road.  A small cottontail had emerged from cover, probably looking for something to eat where the unusually heavy and long-lingering snow had melted back from the asphalt’s edges.  Seeing and hearing the truck, the rabbit bolted unsteadily toward us.  I hit the brakes.  “A bunny,” I said.  As our vehicle slowed to a stop, we saw another flash in the headlights, high up in the air to our right.  A great horned owl dropped out of the darkness into the swath of our lights, swinging its talons toward the rabbit, working its wings to correct its trajectory.  “Whoa!” we said, surprised by the sudden drama. (more) »