PECK SMALL TRACKS

Novitiate to the winter’s glaze

by day you weave your songs in white. 

Then dusk falls, rich Madonna blue.

Branches shuttle icy rosaries. 

Lights flare, swim the evening black.  

The page waits. Again you try 

to print a common thing: how this one day

slipped by—at dawn shadows bloomed 

then shrank by noon to pinnacles.  

Outside: the tree’s dark alphabet.

After rain, the field, a pockmarked carpet.

Beneath the ice some seed

holds code, waiting warmth to speak it. 

Now the night is ink, the field is wide:

you look to peck small tracks across it.

HARDENING OFF

Blond mornings stretch, 

naked sugar flashes. In the trees,  

a hundred shades of micro-green

refract tipping frequencies,

chlorophyll in bright chartreuses.  

In the greenhouse,

lettuces we’ve coddled,

kale that’s germinating

purplish gold—our speckled trout 

(o tender leggy phloem) explode out—

sporting cracked seed husks, toppled helmets. 

We turn off piped-in electric heat. 

We march them out to line the open dirt.  

They wait in flats outside all morning.

Cash crop. Green army.

We entrust them to the season. 

Weather them & set to digging.

Kneel & copy what the trees

are even now above us doing—

coax the sugar out of light.

Turn the light into the feast of leaving.

----

METHOD 

In the dirt you dig fragments.  

Turn them and ponder.

Weed chard. Forms

morph like clouds.

At lunch, you write down

how in this jungle

a gem-backed toad startled 

and hopped away—

how tiger lilies trumpet the sun.

In the bean patch brown spiders, 

egg sacs on their backs.

Toddling through shadows, 

sturdy & wobbling, they are

fragile, pregnant as summer now is—

---

SOLSTICE (LAKE)

Once again today our patron star

whose ancient vista is the long view

turns, full brightness now and here. 

We loll outdoors, sing, make fire.

We have no henge here but after

our swim, linger

by the pond. Dapples flicker

on the pine trunks by the water.

Buzz & hum & wing & song combine.

Light is monument to its own passing. 

Frogs content themselves in bullish chirps,

hoopskirt blossoms

on thimbleberries fall, peeper toads

hop, lazy— 

Apex. A throaty world sings ripen. 

The grove slips past the sun’s long kiss.

We dress. 

We head home in other starlight.  

Our earthly time is sweetening from this. 

---

SOIL BLACK 

Overcast in the fields

     meticulous labor

to rip the unwanted

haul weeds to the woods.

Wheelbarrows of waste.

The baby I planted this year

was only tissue. The botched ovum

did not grow, did not even sprout.

On the computer, its sac

was empty, soil black. 

I bow into absence. 

& yes I know

 many women have harder labors

strapped to the seasons

& to the children

strapped to their backs—

All poems are reprinted with permission from Work & Days by Tess Taylor, published by Red Hen Press. redhen.org/tess-taylor

PECK SMALL TRACKS

Novitiate to the winter’s glaze

by day you weave your songs in white. 

Then dusk falls, rich Madonna blue.

Branches shuttle icy rosaries. 

Lights flare, swim the evening black.  

The page waits. Again you try 

to print a common thing: how this one day

slipped by—at dawn shadows bloomed 

then shrank by noon to pinnacles.  

Outside: the tree’s dark alphabet.

After rain, the field, a pockmarked carpet.

Beneath the ice some seed

holds code, waiting warmth to speak it. 

Now the night is ink, the field is wide:

you look to peck small tracks across it.

HARDENING OFF

Blond mornings stretch, 

naked sugar flashes. In the trees,  

a hundred shades of micro-green

refract tipping frequencies,

chlorophyll in bright chartreuses.  

In the greenhouse,

lettuces we’ve coddled,

kale that’s germinating

purplish gold—our speckled trout 

(o tender leggy phloem) explode out—

sporting cracked seed husks, toppled helmets. 

We turn off piped-in electric heat. 

We march them out to line the open dirt.  

They wait in flats outside all morning.

Cash crop. Green army.

We entrust them to the season. 

Weather them & set to digging.

Kneel & copy what the trees

are even now above us doing—

coax the sugar out of light.

Turn the light into the feast of leaving.

----

METHOD 

In the dirt you dig fragments.  

Turn them and ponder.

Weed chard. Forms

morph like clouds.

At lunch, you write down

how in this jungle

a gem-backed toad startled 

and hopped away—

how tiger lilies trumpet the sun.

In the bean patch brown spiders, 

egg sacs on their backs.

Toddling through shadows, 

sturdy & wobbling, they are

fragile, pregnant as summer now is—

---

SOLSTICE (LAKE)

Once again today our patron star

whose ancient vista is the long view

turns, full brightness now and here. 

We loll outdoors, sing, make fire.

We have no henge here but after

our swim, linger

by the pond. Dapples flicker

on the pine trunks by the water.

Buzz & hum & wing & song combine.

Light is monument to its own passing. 

Frogs content themselves in bullish chirps,

hoopskirt blossoms

on thimbleberries fall, peeper toads

hop, lazy— 

Apex. A throaty world sings ripen. 

The grove slips past the sun’s long kiss.

We dress. 

We head home in other starlight.  

Our earthly time is sweetening from this. 

---

SOIL BLACK 

Overcast in the fields

     meticulous labor

to rip the unwanted

haul weeds to the woods.

Wheelbarrows of waste.

The baby I planted this year

was only tissue. The botched ovum

did not grow, did not even sprout.

On the computer, its sac

was empty, soil black. 

I bow into absence. 

& yes I know

 many women have harder labors

strapped to the seasons

& to the children

strapped to their backs—

All poems are reprinted with permission from Work & Days 
by Tess Taylor, published by Red Hen Press. redhen.org/tess-taylor