FOREST SHADE

COLOR and shade slip hand in hand

Within the forest deeps,

Where cradled 'neath each sunny strand,
A shadow lightly sleeps.

The maiden birches know a way

To gather veils of white,

Which gleaming o'er them through the day,

Are beacons lit at night.

The grounded ferns are wise with lore
Of pigments wrought of gems,
That glow like thin, transparent ore,
Upon their slender stems.

The darkness winds a substance pale
About the tree-trunks' girth,
And chains the lichens, gray as hail,
Unto the eboned earth.

The roots of lavender and brown

Enwreathe the tree-gnomes' urns,

While man, whose graves are in the town, To tired memory turns.

CHALLENGE

HE aspen fauns their clappers took

THE

All made of leaves like blades,

And on the breeze the quick notes shook Unto the Dryad glades.

The hemlocks heard the challenge tossed
Across the pagan waste,

And with their verdant fingers crossed
Their trembling breasts in haste.

The white pines each a taper swung

That lit June's christening,

High where the shadow-pastures hung

Like incense glistening.

The mist hills, blue with heavens flushed,
Brooded like early morn;

Their quiet voice the clamor hushed
Human with symbols lorn.

Still 'neath those silenced mountains wage Fresh challenge and pursuitPerchance man may, with lesser gage,

His soul to leaves transmute.

IN PASSING

PASSING, I heard the cricket's wail

Cleft by the voice of leaves,

Leaves, whose bare cheeks on mine, like hail, The wind-spray hurtling, heaves.

Passing, I saw the grasses weighed
With mists of memoried things,
Things, whose far flight upon me laid,
The shadow of their wings.

APPARITION

HROUGH the blue distance loom the laden

THRO

heights,

Changeless 'mid lives of men that come and go, With dwindling outlines where the cloud-blooms blow,

Inured to time they fend the valley's rights.
Crowding the water's edge, the laughing flights
Of grass-weed bend, and crested pine-waves rise
And fall, sighing their praises to the skies.
Now is it night, bound earthward with delights
Of all the secret, solitary things

Which Nature in her holy scrip doth bind,

Close darkness, and the sleeper's wind that sings,
A shadow-moon with giant trees entwined,
Some startled soul, in corporate wonder pent,
Spying the vision from himself outsent.

WHE

LAKE MEADOWS

WHERE waters, by some Merlin charm empearled,

Until their silence inundates the world,

Shape the stern rocks, and mould them to their end,

Forging of ages, tools that grind and bend,

I sit and watch the silver-flowered moon,
Swift fleeing in her cloud-bedraggled shoon,
A solitary star upon her brow,

Like genius, burdened with its novice-vow.

A bird slips suddenly, his trail

Cleaving a shadow's lonely sail,

Where beaten meadows of the lake flow clear,
Sown with a rippling harvest far and near.