Words, Animals

Someplace Davenport says words are animals. I thought about that while I sling-bladed weeds. Lovely day, drifting clouds. Some house cleaning, some time outside. The high ground. Radio reports of flooding and closed roads. The dog is a bother when I'm trying to work outside. I don't want to interact with her. Just when I go to smell a blossom she tramples down the plant. She'd be a good dog for a horse with room to run. Read several essays about George Marsh. Interesting. 16 years older than Thoreau, must get his "Man and Nature". A love of nature, but with a macro to micro frame as opposed to T's the other way around. I carry them both on my shoulders, when I walk in the woods. It was goats that denuded Greece (Marsh) and sheep that eroded the remnants of Rome (ditto). A deep understanding of drainage. When wooden ships got large, wealthy sea-faring nations protected trees and erosion was not so bad; but we are literally washing into the sea, look at Madagascar, Haiti. It's ugly, what we have wrought. But I love the ridge, so many blossoms, a fragrance now beyond the fecund smell of spring, which I love too, after the frozen nothingness of winter. The white cold smell of ice. I cooked the last morels this evening, in a butter sauce I thickened with fried flour. Made a mess of the kitchen, I am not to be trusted with flour or baby powder, but I left a note, on the fridge, telling the janitor I enjoyed the plums. I say the last morels, because the ticks are out, my days in the woods are numbered. Looked closely at blackberry canes today, because, in the clearings, where trees have fallen and there is light, they are magnificent in their bloom. I carry a piece of leather on these walks, thick but softened from rubbing, maybe 4 inches by 2, that I use to grip things that are thorny. I fold it, like a note you passed in class, around things that otherwise would be painful. Harmonics. Sense is a relative thing. A weird tuning. Visually probably a color-field, one of those paintings you didn't get until you backed off and let your mind drift. Meaning is a mind-set. Sometimes you get it, and sometimes you don't. The world around me, I can barely stand it.