Saltonstall Residency, Ithaca, NY Haibun

Underwater once: all you now ogle. Breakneck falls and scattershot strawberries, chirring spring
peepers and toss of the dice black-and-white warblers, caroming from branch to branch. Gorges
aplenty. If you slacken your pace, the rocks will recite their not-so-secret histories. If you hike
their glacier-grinded faces, you might backtrack to the long centuries of glacier-melt and the
birth of rivers bursting forth, their apprentice tides hammering land into shape, making room for
the rawboned deer that samples the compost at dusk and wild hollyhock that ornaments the trail
behind the artists’ studios. Dub each wild strawberry an injunction, its sweet flame a reminder to
savor the summer. Mind the plunk of caterpillars raining from the trees; someday they’ll snuff
out your breath as American Ladies. Mind the blind man caning forth his own path, but don’t
stare at his bandaged head, fresh blood smeared at the edges. Mind the artist pottering around
until dinnertime or her next vision: crows trailing a red tail hawk like a breakaway skirt. Or grief
still glinting in the dead artist’s bedroom like a precious bell, too tiny to lose. Outside, the cows
are braying from faraway.

A mother’s vast tongue
licks her calf into being,
flush with a new idea.