We entered by stealth its fifteen acres of uncut
forest and buttonbush ponds, having already broken
the rules with our spontaneous intrusion for want
of a guide, the air heady, freighted with the silken
shifting of light through the overstory of maples
and three-hundred-year-old oaks, their feet rooted
and spectral beneath the water’s faintly opaque
surface. And as for us, we were family, well versed
in nature, and then utterly entranced by all of it,
each sedge and rush asserting survival and beauty
as were a pair of pileated woodpeckers, aloft
high above their dead shagbark hickory’s aerie,
each of which left you, my darling, more present
than you had been in days, garrulous and wide-eyed
at your own wit, likening the preserve to heaven
years before you began your departure to paradise.
This poem first appeared in Embracing Wetlands (Last Exit Press, 2024).
—
Myrna Stone is the author of six books of poems. A two-time Ohioana Book Award Finalist, her work has appeared in seventeen anthologies and in over fifty journals including Poetry, Southwest Review, The Massachusetts Review, Boulevard, Nimrod, and River Styx. She has received three Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, a full fellowship to Vermont Studio Center, the 2001 Ohio Poet of the Year award, and the 2017 New Letters Poetry Prize.
