It starts out small in marshlands
with a gradual gathering of vegetation
around a dead, storm-blown branch,
first with a dense layer of moss
and then with a yucca or two
until, a few years later, ferns
that add to the build up of soil,
enough, at least, for seeds to gather
from live oaks to take root.
Then this small forest fosters
further growth of yellow pines
and palmettos and cabbage palms,
and sugar hackberry trees draped
in Spanish moss and vines, and
then flowering myrtle-leaf holly and
Mexican tea; before long you have
a wooded hump that spreads and
and spreads over what was once
very flat wetlands housing snakes,
but now you have a forest full of
brown limpkins in search of prey.
—
Richard F. Fleck, now 88, has published a number of collections over the years, the first being Palms, Peaks and Prairies, 1967 and the most recent being Bamboo in the Sun: Poems of Japan, 2020. His many books include A Colorado River Reader, 2000, Desert Rims to Mountains High, 2013, and Henry Thoreau and John Muir among the Native Americans, 2016. He is a retired professor of American literature and Native American Studies at the University of Wyoming with visiting appointments at Osaka University, Japan and the University of Bologna, Italy.
