I Listen to April; A Bog in Late March

I Listen to April

Behind their mothers, the skittish kids
try to hide, although of course I mean them
no harm. One nanny blithely persists
in breaking off berry canes and chewing,
 
each bite a wonder. However defeated
my hearing by age, I catch
the crunch of stalk and bramble and bud.
How on earth can she do it? Why doesn’t each bite
 
make for a laceration?
The yard’s all mud and dark pellets of dung
and the hillside freshets are warbling spring.
Behind the slanting barn,
 
a cover crop of winter wheat
shows bright under tatters of remnant snow.
A raucous flock of ravens
—⁠in older days it was called an unkindness⁠—
 
crowds the woods, each bird producing
a disparate call. Why unkindness?
The name for a group of goats is a trip.
I like it. A trip, I silently say.
 
Three horseback riders pass.
All the goats collectively stutter,
and each of the high-stepping horses whinnies
its separate response. Oh Lord,
 
what a musical world! For now at least,
I feel greatly blessed to exist within it.
Some lingering pine siskins hiss
as one from conifers close by.
 
I’m all alone, no reason to speak,
and I’m too keen for sounds anyhow.
They keep on coming and coming, thank heaven.
Someone fires a shot nearby.
 
There’s a whang: the shooter has sent
a bullet, and then another, through metal.
What can I be thinking
when two such noises, muting the others,
 
strike me this morning as tranquil?
 
 
 

A Bog in Late March

 
Pure quiet where I stand, between winter and spring, the yammer
of duck and wood frog yet to be heard. No matter
 
a flock of the usual geese flew over, their din
has gone with them, so silence settles all over again.
 
Time calls up descriptions of speed—it flies, it gallops⁠—
but this dismal mixture that falls in soggy dollops
 
on my antique anorak and this arbor of spruce,
inadequate shelter, but my only possible choice⁠—
 
all of this makes rebirth seem a matter of decades.
The only adornments, though the word’s unavoidably vague,
 
are the off-red rose hips that clung to the bush all winter.
The flowers fell long since, but those small globes offer
 
intimations of hope. So I try to imagine,
because the dismal bog needs a counter-vision:
 
winding, empty dirt roads and flourishing grass,
which horses graze in one of these fields I pass.
 
This, of course, is my young adulthood calling.
I’m riding my own horse there in that far different setting,
 
six decades before I’ll be where I am just now,
mud clutching my boots, insisting you can’t go.
 
Ignoring its grip, I hold to my fantasy:
me, shirtless, whooping it up, bright sky,
 
that mare breaking wind as she bucks, all vibrancy⁠—
drunk on young, untenable power like me.
 
I must see myself again, taut-muscled, strident.
The bog’s dead quiet, this fathomless quiet, requires it.