Field Notes: Worcester County, April
Acorns sprout beards spongy-white as grubbing maggots.
Iris and crocus give way to forsythia and hyacinth; violets sprout from the lawn of the empty house where an elderly couple froze to death last winter.
(The burgundy of their maple.)
A shadow precedes the hunter, crow-shaped but larger.
Stone walls grow lichen and wet.
In the city, building facades hoard sunlight, and we are told by pressing an ear to the floor of the train station, we may hear the gurgle of the buried canal. This is not meant to be a lesson on belief.
Sun. Hail. Then snow, sun, sleet, rain, sun. The recent birds silenced among church bells.
A branch of gray-white blossoms does its good work against a low gray sky.
A dove paused redly in the road returns to pigeonhood.
The earth divulges rabbits.
If I make a bargain with the oncoming light, who will enforce it?
Field Notes: Worcester County, September
Four o’clock snapdragon glows, a piece of pigeon’s blood stained glass.
Every morning I unshroud the mailbox hunting ground. Webs weighted with discarded particulates: leaves, wings, legs.
Green retreats from the borders of the maple leaves. Birds are anonymous bellies, dabs of light.
Invisible crickets practice morning at the bus stop. Clovers flush. But the thistles are stubborn emerald, then dead.
A sharp half-moon turns nimbus, sentimental in twilight. Smell of acetone and tar.
Electric green silence after the rain. No pools; every plant droops, willing to burst rather than forego a drop.
A break in the wave pattern is a funeral procession.
Goldenrod blooms before the shagbark hickory nuts fall away from the abandoned house.
The air claims, correctly, that something is on fire. A new school.
Counting: Virginia creeper, pokeweed, two versions of evening primrose.
Counting again: First queen Anne’s lace wilted by sunrise. First milkweed pod split. First leaf rag rattle overwhelmed by goose-blare.
Someone drew a swastika on __________’s folder.
Aster lavenders behind a guardrail.
A storm with no wind, except in the pine heights. The phone rings. Dusk rabbit, secret rabbit.
An appleless crabapple puts out new leaves.
Field Notes: Worcester County, November
Chickadees pick at a wasp nest, indifferent to the hawk ahead, gliding low and lackadaisical as windchimes setting loose their chords among the leafless trees.
The mouthparts of a dragonfly, valve-like and glossy red as rambling rosehips, close around nothing.
Recalling last year’s sleddable snow, I rip a ripe tomato off the vine, and eat.
Unperturbed katydid of palest sage: another lost sense of urgency.
Yet cosmos, larkspur, bachelors’ buttons, hawkbit—all trouble themselves to burst into color once more, as if to taunt the bare brown birds restless in the rhododendron, like children plotting on the stairs past bedtime, thinking themselves unobserved.
Moon with racing clouds: un-penumbra.
Each fall of light through crimson branches an instance—
On the walk home, we smell death under the pine needles. Flies clamor around a crushed garter snake in the road.
Stormblown leaves captive in the burning bush spangle like a frantic flotilla signaling to a receding ship.
Chill follows mist, strips the landscape down to grisaille essentials: marsh, field, gull-shaped birds. Cloudcover for the hours.
Moth wings cup a faint convexity against cold glass. Snow, barely, come morning.
Heartsease shrugs off frost. There are no seasons in the kingdom of grief.
I pass a boy who knows me, who grunts as if he’s forgotten his own name. How easily I’m diverted from imagining his miseries—a dump truck barking, gnashing up the hill, DO NOT PUSH stamped across its tailgate.
Sunrise strikes only bare trunks and the undersides of the last leaves. Bronze against a gunmetal sky no one should believe.
Carolyn Oliver is the author of Whale Garden (River River Books, forthcoming 2027), The Alcestis Machine (Acre, 2024), Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022; selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize), and three chapbooks. Her poems appear in TriQuarterly, Image, Ecotone, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She lives in Massachusetts. (Online: carolynoliver.net)
