Stratford Ecological Center in Delaware provides a great place for rest and retreat. Yesterday, with pen, backpack and sarong for cover from the mosquitos I took their walk down to the river, now a dry bed, for solace and inspiration.
Muggy and buggy, with spiders webs strung across the path, tree to tree every five feet, high season for gnats. Plentiful nets. One spider looked as if it had a moth attached to its back, perhaps a female carrying spiderlets.
I sat down by the river that a friend and I visited two winters ago, then in full flood with bright orange shelf fungus against the black logs, when her marriage seemed dead and I struggled with my family's divisions.
In the morning, I'd prepped myself to write a poem by reading my favorite book of poetry, 'Ants on the Melon' by Virginia Hamilton Adair, which alwasy opens my mind to fresh images and the play of wordsound. Faced with a dry streambed, slapping at the bugs, sitting on a fungus-infested log, I wondered how anything deep could emerge from such an ordinary woodland scene. So I began to play with words in my head, to listen, and got the first line: in a dry riverbed, stones lie with uncovered heads.
After some fiddling, it came through:
August
In the dry riverbed
stones lie with uncovered heads
waiting for water
to run again.
Humidity's potential presses me
air like sea.
September's thunderheads
will bring flooding rain
a log's fungal ears
hear a plish plash refrain.
Shadow is the progeny of sun.
In this swollen cloud
lightning's begun.
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