In the Midst of the Snowy Forest

(After Major Jackson https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/major-jackson#tab-poems)


The shadows of pines on the snow cast their canvas.
The Downy Woodpecker stabbing beak carves words
that my pen cannot equal into the January morning.
Her chirping is filled with a feasting frenzy resolve 
for the beetle larvae beneath the bark.

I look, but even with my wood-boring eyes I cannot 
interrogate beyond the known:  the pillars of sunlight,
the fast-moving clouds beyond the sides of the
corporeal mountain.  Its white plumes dissolving
through the winter quiet my self, ideas, everything 
I have that is worth saying.

Below me, the stripped saplings, stand Spartan sentry
awaiting orders to bloom.  The entire forest is 
frozen and glistening.  Sealed in all its forms is 
the austere world I love: the runnels that will 
resurrect soon into streams and fields, branches
of black line’s crisscrossing to the Arctic horizon.