Suspect Metaphor

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined–
from Williams, “Spring and All”

The northeast corner of our house belongs to blackberries. A short and weathered wall of rounded stones gives some form to a thicket of canes that reach well above my outstretched arm. On this windy April morning, the russet canes spring lightly, their knots of delicate green restlessly tracing circuits in the sky. In summer, as leaf subsides to leaf, these same sparse canes bow slowly earthward with the weight of ripened fruit – bearing a prodigious harvest for which I am ever grateful.
By early afternoon, still beneath a clear sky and warming sun, I’ve moved deep into the berry copse. The tapered canes still feint and parry overhead as I work to thin the dried, woody remnants of last year’s growth. As I snip and pull, they poke and scrape across my wrists that I have imprudently left uncovered.
Over the years, brambles have worn faint paths across the clapboards in arcs that mirror the nested crescents left by the scythe on the grass below. I am reassured by these wind-borne gyres of the resolute certainty with which these berries face each year, yet now, even as I finish my work and know I need to turn to other tasks, I am reluctant to emerge from their embrace. For a moment, I stand, scratched and sore and still among these earnest canes, resplendent in their unkempt beauty, spiring into the deep blue of an April sky.

I am up early again, looking across the valley, watching for first light. Today an earthy palette redolent of russet and morel slowly draws the still world into consciousness. One by one, the ragged arms of white pines, pointed spires of firs, and a fretwork of flowering red maples reveal themselves against the muted, tawny sky. In time, the spring frost salting the grass will recede into the shadows of the trees, of the shed and barn, and of errant tools and toys left out overnight, sketching angular outlines across the lawn that yield in the face of the warming sun to leave only the damp of dew. But now, in the intimacy between night and day, I stare into the spreading ribbon of sepia sky in the east, and before color overwhelms the day, I cling tightly to these moments of moss gray light, not willing to admit to the futility of marcescence.

The product of a collaborative, creative, convivial, and somewhat competitive writing exercise this morning:

The trees in this pasture were not born from the same fruit, nor of the same tree. The world here, even as I lose myself in the gloaming of midday and duck through thickets of apple, aspen, and birch, is anything but still. Beyond the upper fields, shorn close weeks ago for the last time, are the overgrown lower pastures where apple trees have sprung up in a serpentine web. One tree, pendulous with luminous yellow apples, has grown so close to another that their trunks touch and their roots must be knotted to each other deep underground. Their unkempt latticework of branches nonetheless resolutely yields fruit — one a chorus of sour green, another a smattering of mottled red, a third holding only two apples high above the reach of deer, pale, delicate, and wan. Each year’s new growth of apples awakens us, in the chilled shadows of autumn afternoons, to our own rootedness amidst the wild tangles of what I can imagine were once Cortland, Baldwin, and Northern Spy.

In the morning’s early hours, my dog and I walk up the road in time to watch night slipping westward behind a ridge of white pines as an airy aria of spring wafts up from the river valley below. We stand circumscribed by the bleating tail feathers that punctuate the undulating gyres of an unseen snipe overhead. I strain against the dull, cool sky to see his rhetorical flourishes as a waning gibbous moon sidles comfortably between the still bare branches of maple and beech behind us. Higher still, the dark of the pines begins to ebb in the face of the slowly emerging sun. For a moment, I am tempted to follow my dog into the woods and up the slope to meet the colors of the dawn, but I know other obligations will soon draw me back to the house, so I turn square to the spreading pool of light in the east, close my eyes to the wind, and, for a moment, give myself over to the depth of this place.