My favorite stump straddles a gully a dozen miles from any human habitation. My eschatology includes scats, animal poop, scatology so that when I nestle under this stump out of the rain I see the scats of bear, bobcat, coyote. I won't say that I feel at home under this vast white pine stump, the roots spread around me, so large in places no arms can encircle them, as if you were under the body of a mythic spider, the thunder ratcheting the sky so that the earth hums beneath you. Here is a place to think about nothing, which is what I do. If the rain beats down hard enough tiny creeks form beside my shit-strewn pile of sand. The coyote has been eating mice, the bear berries, the bobcat a rabbit. It's dry enough so it doesn't smell except for ancient wet wood and gravel, pine pitch, needles. Luckily a sandhill crane nests nearby so that in June if I doze I'm awakened by her cracked and prehistoric cry, waking startled, feeling the two million years I actually am. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...ANDRE'S LAST REQUEST [OR, REQUEST TO WASHINGTON] [OCTOBER 1, 1780] by NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS THE MORAL FABLES: THE FOX AND THE WOLF by AESOP THIRTEEN AT TABLE by PIERRE JEAN DE BERANGER A.G.A.V. by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN GRANDSER by ABBIE FARWELL BROWN AN ELEGY ON THE COUNTESS DOWAGER OF PEMBROKE by WILLIAM BROWNE (1591-1643) THE WANDERER: 2. IN FRANCE: ASTARTE by EDWARD ROBERT BULWER-LYTTON |