So what is it I'm doing exactly?
Removing fallen limbs from the trail?
What tragedy should a hiker have to step around them.
Up on the ridge, a thousand feet,
I'm trying to make nature friendly.
Maple, you shouldn't have died here.
White pine, don't you know these
yellow markings mean human.
Maybe I should clear scrub
for a better view of the creek below.
And damn the local wild-life.
They're the wall-flowers of spring.
So shy, it's like they only live for themselves
and not for tourist types with cameras.
Nocturnal... to our visitors that means 'not at all.'
What's that I hear? People out already.
Wilderness opens its doors early around here.
I can hear them stop to breath the oxygen
like they don't get in the city.
And they've spied a bird that they're struggling to name.
Fresh air, anonymous birds.
Glad to be of assistance.
Lake so thick with algae,
hard to tell where bank leaves off
and water begins.
Row out on it
and it's like you're maneuvering
through a field.
The fish like it,
for its food, its camouflage.
And egrets peck at the edges,
loons recormoiter overhead.
To the birds, it's still a lake,
a magnet for their hunger.
Only I, with my associations,
see things differently.
Its skin's infected with some kind of mange.
It's the secret sewage of the willows
that hug its rim.
Or nature, which abhors a vacuum,
is not so fond of beauty either,
produces a snake for every fawn,
a weed to poke its common tongue
at haughty wildflower.
Scum clings to the bottom of the boat,
coats the oars, oozes toward us
like a fifties' movie monster.
But we cast our lines anyhow,
defy the ubiquitous muck.
Besides, what is man out here
but another kind of algae.
And when the fish are biting,
it's not to cleanse
their lotus land of worms.
John Grey has been published recently in Agni, Worcester Review, South Carolina Review and The Pedestal with work upcoming in Poetry East and REAL.