Field Notes: Worcester County, January

You will know the death of the century oak by the hollows its absent thirst makes: mirrors clouding in the flash freeze. Crystal shards jut into recurrence like the sunburst on art deco elevator doors, closing.

Fine as sawdust, snow blows in cylinders around invisible centers. Smell of nothing.

In the maple a high silent nest trails plastic tentacles the same blue as the sky.

Field inversion: sky branches against boughs.

That pale speck of plane a waylaid gull.

A Cooper’s hawk becomes a blurry finial on a pine. Straight on, closer, I believe it would be all beak, its eyes would go missing. It swoops low into a thicket.

I am surprised—why?—when it returns, settles on a crabapple branch. Breast of rust and sand, tail barred with white.

Twisting and flicking, each twitch releases a starburst of grey. The kill I didn’t see: a smaller bird, blending into limb and talon, pinned for plucking. No sound, no movement except what the hawk makes.

The wind is gone too. From the bouncing bough feathers and chunks of snow fall implacable to the snow-slope below.

Later, in a slant of sun at a diver’s angle, I will see their pockmarks. Dots and dashes, doubles. Some impenetrable code. Missing key.

Now pecking into the flesh. Red string. I turn. Sinister I seem, a threat. The hawk removes its prize to the arborvitae shadows. Private thrashing.

Ice gathers inside old windows, the smoke of it—

But why shouldn’t it come back, I ask myself.

I have loved the wind.

Field Notes: Worcester County, June

The cities of the ants rise up in the sharp grass, spread under rabbits’ paws, under the shadow of a mud-dauber wasp, flying low.

Crow surveillance from a utility pole. I don’t believe in omens today.

Cottonwood seeds, startling snow-stars, drift over the schoolyard thick with small figures. [How quickly breach in the perimeter slips into my mind. How I berate myself for failing to calculate the distance to cover.] Bodies run, clot, explode into new formations. Nova. Nova. Nova.

Dry barking at sunset: fox, or the drought wind through last year’s leaves.

Not enough bees to tend the white clover.

In the shade a robin drags a worm out of the earth. Angle, tension, resistance. Violence, a relearning.

Through barred light, glimpse of a heron fishing the reservoir shallows. Again and again snarling motorcycles shove aside the day’s intentions.

Stars lost in a xanthous haze. Nearly midnight, between the runway and the field muted green summer sounds from the undergrowth. A good smell, soft as spent pollen cones underfoot.

Two squirrels chasing each other through a maple tree is the sound of a bear.

Then the silence of the bear’s shoulders gliding below an open window. The silence of its paws in tentative moss. The silence of its head on its massive collared neck, at the low gap between the trimmed cedars [What did he call it once? His child entrance.] facing the road. A motorcycle’s open-throated throttle, and the bear leaps, retreats, returns to sound, scales the hidden fence and lopes deeper into the neighborhood.

The need for repetition. More woods thinned out. Exposure.

A fox crosses the yard, grazing the fog with its tail. Two hours later the sun has burnt off the haze, and a man screams at a teenage boy through their front door: You worthless piece of shit.

4:01 a.m.: the first birds sing. One minute later, the first cars in an hour speed by from the north. A strong sunrise heats the maple leaves translucent neon, exposes the impasto brushwork of cedar and hemlock.

Carolyn Oliver is the author of Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022), selected by Matthew Olzmann for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. Her chapbooks are Mirror Factory (Bone & Ink Press, 2022), Dearling (dancing girl press, 2022), and Night Ocean (Seven Kitchens Press, forthcoming 2023), and her poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, Smartish Pace, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, At Length, Plume, and elsewhere. A nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net in both fiction and poetry, Carolyn is the winner of the Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, the E. E. Cummings Prize from the NEPC, the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry, and the Frank O’Hara Prize from The Worcester Review, where she now serves as editor. Carolyn lives in Massachusetts with her family. Her website is carolynoliver.net.

Published January 15 2023