The endless canopy is long since broken
and yet, there remains these vast stretches
of northern New England,
outside the boundaries of our consciousness,
where time is dense and heavy, moves slow,
and size doesn't factor in humanity.
I stand at the base of a red oak, a willing dwarf,
stare up at branches lofty enough to be sky.
Light perforates the summery cover with
bright lances, shimmering arrows.
My son is farther ahead,
lured by the sirens of a nearby stream.
While he stirs the waters,
I struggle to look down to the bottom.
Is that a cross half-buried in the silt or just a stone?
He's a succession of disparate noises,
excitement packaged in sapling skin and bone.
How cruel he is to the gentle cadence of this place.
Shush I say, like a haughty librarian,
but that doesn't stop the babbling.
He wants to step out on the slippery rocks
or scramble up the swamp oak.
Fan-shaped orange chicken mushrooms hold no interest.
Nor polypore wedged like upside down saucers in a birch.
I try to hold him back with a darner
buzzing on a branch, its abdomen sheer and blue as opal.
But my son rattles on as if this is a schoolyard
and I am a dozen of his friends.
He doesn't understand that this world calls for silence, stillness -
like maidenhair, shuffled by wind but rooted in place,
scalloped edge of fronds tickling the nearest maple trunk.
Two hundred years ago, I tell him,
this was all farms.
And now eastern red cedar grazes,
scotch pine sheds its needles on cornfield bones.
The kid's as antsy as a chipmunk.
It's not that the woods bore him.
But he's young and one place at a time
is three too few.
He can't rest on a fallen log
or drop to his knees,
stick his nose in the trillium's jaw.
He doesn't understand that once this was all there was.
Look around. If this foliage, the wildlife,
couldn't house and feed you
then you'd crawl up under a willow tree and die.
It's the primitive, the remote,
that I wish to enter into
but .he holds me back with fear of a failing grade,
or dislike of an assigned chore
or the latest joke relayed around his classroom.
He can't leave behind what he knows of life.
This is all new to him
but it's not an alternative,
merely something to be added on
to what he has already accumulated.
I seek out peace and understanding
beyond my own cocoon,
in the heron footprints on the muddy pond banks,
the juice from the downy gray milkweed leaf,
the flashy calico pennant and flashing lightning bug,
a flurry of cabbage whites like rising snow.
If only he would tire,
seek rest and shelter, stay still, absorb.
If only we could flop somewhere on the ground together,
enrapt in the. meadow-around us,
its hush broken only by the call of an unseen bird,
the buzz, the flicker of insects making their brief living.
That's the way to a proper education.
Whatever the lesson,
it is all to the good
and not coming from inside us...until it is.