Walking in Windham Woods                                 ©   A. Jones 2007

I walked across the farmer's field;
it reminded me of England
the way he doesn't mind the kindly trespass
of ramblers heading for the common trail.

I passed beneath a hullabaloo of birdsong
to gaze at a new plowed field
watched bugs like dust motes darting all above
a dragonfly with wings like ice
the ditditdit-dah of a woodpecker announcing
his rightful place above us all.

Steady above me jutted the bare, brown anemones
of pine branches, stark
in the perpetual dusk of these lower woods,
while too far above to elucidate
their heads and shoulders broke through the forest canopy
in a billowing of green.

I have walked these woods fifty times and still
here is a path I have never tried.
It takes me by one of many ponds
and up into a clearing where I am surprised
by a redundancy of ferns pushing up
through the soft mulch

and across the little paved path I know well
into a field that once was cleared
and now speaks of silver birch and honeysuckle
long grasses and the anxious proliferation
of gypsy moth nests.
I circumnavigate this young glade
dipping here and there into woods and out
always wary of the rash of poison ivy creeping
into the overgrown places,

pause by ladyslippers
nodding on the path
and squint down a steep hill to mark
the unmoving giant finger of a dead tree,
its story written in the surrounding pool.


I leave its broken spire
and all the other small tragedies of the woods
to make my way back
in this gentle, magic hour.
I am almost to my car when, following a hunch

to the left, I come upon the nearly buried foundation
of what was once a house;
thick vines snake over the cement steps
and a tree grows in the living room.
I can hardly get close, and mosquitos
feather around me like the hungry poor

but I must stop here a while, and sigh
over the lost history of this place
once home to someone
now invisible to the world and forgotten
forgotten
like all the villages gone back to Earth
their citizens long since fled
against the inevitability
of kings
and the steady, slow rush
of time.