Grove of Maples

This is one of my favorite things to drive past. 

In a few places nearby, a grove of sugar maples 

has established itself in the middle of a pasture. 

The trees together form a large shape 

resembling one tree. 

The family that owns this one usually runs cattle in this field, 

but one year they put an electric fence around the grove 

and used it as a picnic ground. 

Made me jealous! 

We are here for one more week and already 

the leaves that turned first have fallen. 

I took this just this afternoon, 

so we still have some autumn color left and it is still raining, 

which seems to intensify how the colors shine 

even as it knocks some leaves to the ground.

DIM SUM

     I'm thinking of the smooth green hills where writing comes from, leaf-tips barely peeking from twig-tips, cat's-eye green, the air cooly smooth against the cheek as a refrigerated egg.

     The new green hills are green, as green as memory, and as old. The house, as usual, a wreck, the first sowbug of spring advancing across the floorboards, beyond control, the millipede that rushes up, all summery, from the bathtub drain. Come Sunday we'll go out for dim sum again, the elderly at rest behind their newspapers, the young in party clothes, the moonwhite noodles thick and fragrant on the plate. That the living can feed upon such stuff. Dead matter, dead meat.

     If a word is repeated, let it be the contexts that rhyme. Not glibness, that party trick -- having to dunk one's head in a martini reciting "Skunk Hour" over and over, until you're sick. 

     No language now, only the day and circumstance. Not the pedigree of words, what they might be in French, or whether this is of significance.

     I'm thinking of the smooth green hills where writing comes from. Two kinds of thinking. What kind of writing when it rains.

Roo Borson, Water Memory, McClelland & Stewart, Inc, Canada, 1996, page 17.

Roo Boorson again tonight because I will most probably leave her books in my book room here. I do admire the movement and variety of thought in this poem. This discovery of her and through that anthology, other Canadian poets has been a highlight of this year.

And this is my own grove, which I will leave soon to manage itself until next year.