A Thin Place in Beech Forest

With gratitude to Mary Oliver for While I am writing a poem to celebrate summer

Follow in the
wake of a fox’s faint
twitches, her pauses and rolling pink
shadow. Her sunstretching length, like the roses,
flows along bog-edge and berm that
have never been improved but
rise and roll invisible under twists of brushbramble. Come
sink among skunk cabbage, thread boulders, to
root down and rise like a spring bud
in the beech forest. Then
trace the blackwater edge to open
space across the bridge, like
a poem.

Chickadeedeedees grasp a little
seed from your palm then scatter, like afternoon light, soft
nowhere and everywhere at once. Sighs
lean into the moss ledge. Stand under
the logic of leaves, in the
cool clear river of the meadowlarks’
whistle, its
heavenly bodies of breathpraise
posing as constellations, Orion’s anthem.

Could you form words sufficient in thanks
for the fox whose footprance you could never emulate? Its
gravity holds sway in this arboreal kingdom, where our grounded poet’s alleluia!
still echos along the edges of the pond, calling to the fox — alleluia!
And I am caught wondering, wandering, levitating, elevating, oh
so high up above these woods, and the miracle of its flashing firelord.

– Kate Wallace Rogers