Solitary in Albemarle County
Late spring, and twilight’s early
nightbirds work the lower fields.
They spill in and out of smoky depths
of sycamores and pines, fen smells
of damp forest, hollows of rain
pooled beneath skeletal birch trees.
So much yields itself in silence:
shadows spilling from a bridge
over the Rapidan, a small fishing boat
shouldered back into shoreline.
An owl, trapped in the second story
of a crumbling barn, flutters room to room.
Toward the Rapidan River
Autumn begins along a disused road
with wind that flares into fields, deepening
tree lines of hemlock and alder hedged
with shadows and ribbons of mudded tracks.
The wind belongs to a solitary walker
or easy lope of hunters — if only for a mere flash,
sifts deadfall and a far-off diesel’s soundless
thread of smoke.
A skim of kestrels is sun-dazed over undulant
ground. Their flight is thoughtless grace
in the sport of distance: Frays Mill or Simmons Gap,
farms battened onto hillsides.
Yielding to silence, I think in the span of one
exhaled breath that time might stop. In the glide
of cloud-shadow, I pause by a brambled-over
woodpile, turn and listen for an echo.
