The Eternal News of Early June

 In memory of Dale Hoyt *

Come, my friend, just one last time 

and walk me down a Garden path 

reliving a ramble in early June 

when once again a hummingbird house 

is wound in silk and saliva. Describe 

how it’s layered with lichens and leaves 

then show where it hides 

high in a white oak 

cloaked in a canvas of green. 

Come weave a tale of hungry toads 

hunting the musty leaf-littered dampness 

under the air-dance of damselflies. 

Then mimic the trill of a Leopard frog 

and the plucked glunk of its Green cousin 

calling from a froggy shore. 

Now talk me through the gruesome fate 

of zombie bugs riddled with fungus 

clinging to leaf-tip graves. 

Speak of the hidden lives in soil – 

of thousand-gendered mycelia 

and subterranean slime-mold sex. 

Then show me the home of chanterelles 

where gold funnels grow 

on a green moss floor.

Bring on the air of an early summer 

bounding through a boyhood day 

recalling the ways of wonder 

and watch me shed my decades 

like the sloughed skin of an aging snake 

baking in the noonday sun.

Come the twist of eternity 

let us idle outside the gates of heaven 

to drift in the peace of a warm summer breeze.

* Over many years, Dale led the Nature Ramblers at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia. He kept a detailed record on his award-winning Nature Rambling blog site. My poem describes a ramble on June 11, 2015. Here is a link to Dale's blog post for that week: 

https://naturerambling.blogspot.com/2015/06/ramble-report-june-11-2015.html

Dale Hoyt teaching at a ramble

Ruby throated hummingbird on nest
Image by Don Hunter

The Serpent

                        Quantum strings always ring assigned 

                        frequencies  with songs that constrain 

                        matter  in  the  dance  of  chance  and 

                        brute necessity. Inert bodies undergird 

                        all  that we are.   Brains of beasts  are  

                        bullied by what came before. But life!

                Life bears the foretaste of freedom – what is not  

           forbidden, one day becomes. And in the garden, God’s  

            honey-voiced servant wakes new worlds of knowing.

                                     Ah, the siren-serpent

                                        blows jazz notes

                                                  riffs

                             below the threshold of thinking

                                       where blood rises

                                             unbidden

              and circuits etch symbols as Adam sings names

                      beasts of the field and birds of the air

                                             captured

                                       in the holy dance

                                   of fire and abstraction

                in the shade of the tree that towers mid-garden

                                        stepping lightly

                            to syncopated serpent-rhythm

                   incipient mind finds the symbol for mind

                                          regards itself 

               staring back, stripped of innocence, conscious 

                                      of consciousness

                         it falls through the face of infinity

                                             emerges 

                                      to indeterminacy

                     with furrowed temple and tart aftertaste

                                   free, aware, ashamed

                                               at last