hundreds + thousands |
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| poetry in the landscape / writing on leaves / numbered leaves / words on leaves / words and landscape/
numbering every leaf on a tree / surrey art gallery bc canada |
| journal |
| April 19th.
I’ve begun the phrases. In the wet woods by the stream, on a translucent vine maple leaf: “green rain." On an osier dogwood: “Did you see?” My imagination inflates them, the words seem blatant, enormous, obtrusive as flashing neon lights. It feels transgressive, almost illegal, as if I’m writing in a library book, scrawling graffiti in a public place. Reality check: the words so small, written cautiously on the leaf, scarcely noticeable, something to find by accident, if found at all. Something there, seen but unseen. I write one more line on a salmonberry leaf, then stop. The woodland leaves are still so fresh that they’ll bruise if I handle them, they’re all sap and succulence, newborn. May 16th. The pond. There’s an ornamental pond in the gardens. I hang over the railings, hoping to see something. There’s Elodea, algae. Dead leaves. Melge. There’s got to be tadpoles. Nothing. Water striders, a diving beetle. Then I see a tadpole. I knew it, there had to be tadpoles. Then two more. Four. Five, six, seven. I go over to the low bank on the sunny side. Stuck on the pondweed like round fruit are dozens of tadpoles. I count a hundred in two square yards. I like it here. The more you look, the more you see. A clutching motion in the mud: a caddisfly larva in its tiny sand tube. Live slivers of carrot, all less than 2 centimeters long. A dozen. Two dozen. Three. Brand new goldfish, nervous, bunching, so small they’d all be comfortable in a cup. Red-osier dogwood petals float on the water. > |