by Reed Venrick
Remembering Thoreau,
Who wrote that the mass
Of men and women lead lives
Of quiet desperation,
Remembering not those elegant,
Convoluted lines well-writ, but pausing
To recall how, as the French express it:
Thoreau “learned me” the consciousness
Of the forest, since all around, I smelled
Blooming sickly-sweet spring oaks in
Those I counted nearby, and circles of
Hundreds more that interspersed with
Sweet bays, elderberry bushes, myrtle
Shrubs, and eager-climbing trumpet flower
Vines—wind-swept love grass and golden-
Rod faces grinning ‘round the wetland’s
Spade lilies with purple-finger blooms, where
Thousands struggle to breathe together
Through cattail dust on the island, manifesting
Fragile forms—straining, stretching for clouds,
Like me, barely breathing this 93 degrees,
Here on a stifling afternoon on a hiking trail,
I, pausing before the sun’s stroking,
Stretching longleaf pines—bursting needle
Bouquets spotlighting thickets of palmetto
Palms—and, now, glancing aside—witness
One palm’s frond extend its’ bladed
Fingers reaching to grasp the slicing sun’s
Rays before they crash on the forest floor,
As I, extending a hand, turn my wrist to
An open palm, spreading fingers to overlap
The blades of the palm’s green fan
To feel the hot rays of the sun’s fire
On my hand—realizing that this palm
Tree must also revel in that intensity
Of my fading home star—this petite
Palm, no taller than my shoulder-line,
Half-healthy, but anxious to manifest its’
Elegant design, given a rough-rooted place
In the salty sand of a peninsula, where
It will never grow tall, never even fulfill
Its parent’s vertical line, here between
The seas, ocean-to-gulf, while I, lingering
Long beside the stunted palm, yet realizing
We both feel the summer’s cooling rain and
Wind of a Florida fall’s hurricane, and again
Recalling Thoreau, that literary woodsman,
That I’m disoriented on an unfamiliar trail, I
Pause to sit on a log, having lost my bearings
And squint into a burnt-burgundy twilight
Of an imminent island’s night. I recall how
Thoreau “learned me” not by memorizing names
Of Latin, but by pointing toward an exciting
But dangerous path, where I struggle to breathe
Through the humid straw of hay-fever spring.
Reed Venrick is a Florida-based writer who usually summers in France.
Little Leaf Literary Journal 