What Am I?

Rae Spencer4 Comments

What am I
When I’m spinning?

A giddy earthen child
Hair and hands in orbit
All my brilliant paths described
By Riemann’s rumpled planes

When dizzy, I collapse in grass
Yearn toward the evening moon
Enchanted by its gibbous rise
Its constant tide-locked face

Tugs the sea and me alike
The atoms of our mass
Bound ebb to flow, neap to high
By Newton’s Principia

While Schrödinger’s wistful cat
Waits in later pages
Unknown as yet, and left to pace
In undetermined fate

What am I
When I’m sleeping?

A prism child of night
Splintered into photon dreams
Cradled in hot nebulae
And scattered throughout space

A bleak and cold infinitude
Some billion other worlds
Suspended around other stars
In beginning states of grace

Unseen, like ore in deep, hot veins
Compressed beneath the ages
Until revealed by algorithm
And captured in equation

With Schrödinger’s hapless cat
Purring at my side
Alive and dead, unrealized
An enigma in time’s keeping

Henbit and Purple Dead-nettle

Rae Spencer4 Comments

Until last year, I never gave much thought to the “purple stuff” that claims the yard each spring. A few hours experimenting with my camera’s macro function converted indifference to fascination. I had never noticed the delicate, fringed mouths and tapering, graceful throats. I had never noticed the subtle differences that mean there are two distinct species of these purple beauties.

Once again, the urge to name what I photograph sent me into research mode. Aided by a 1968 edition of Peterson’s Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-central North America and Virginia Tech’s online Weed Identification Guide, I discovered that the purple blooms are two related species of the mint family:  henbit and purple dead-nettle.

It still seems ironic that I found them listed as both wildflowers and weeds.

I believe the first two photos are henbit, and the last is purple dead-nettle. Please comment with correction and/or confirmation!

More Signs of Spring

Rae Spencer7 Comments

This afternoon my nerves tingle with spring. It’s hard to deny the season when dandelions, hyacinths, and tulips add their voices to the clamor of change. Even the dog speaks, shedding her winter coat in dry clumps, which I scatter from her brush as offerings for the birds. Because I hear them calling, the cardinals and mockingbirds, chickadees and robins. Even a tufted titmouse, a new song for an old yard, aching with hope.

Decay

Rae Spencer8 Comments

By decay, I mean death and its attendants. Detritus and carrion. Decomposition. The rank rot of demise invades every corner of life, a weltering profusion of scavengers overhead and underfoot. They sort and clean, engineering life from death in dank procession, so that leaves grow anew and grass sprouts fresh for the grazers. Scavengers both hasten and stem entropy’s tide, converting order to chaos to order again. Rapid and ageless, decay is our most accurate measure of time, and our most pervasive reminder that time is measured.

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The hawk attack prompted me to pull this piece out of my files. The writing is old, but some of the photos are new.

Hawk Again

Rae Spencer5 Comments

Yesterday afternoon this hawk killed a robin in my back yard. I don’t know if he is the same hawk as the one that killed our baby rabbit, but I have my suspicions. This time, instead of flying away with his prize, he stayed in the rose bed. He ate for nearly a half-hour, even gulped down the bones before he left.

This is only the second time I’ve seen a hawk in my yard, while robins are a constant presence. I’m torn between awe and sorrow, between the stunning beauty of my visitor and the sad spectacle of orange feathers strewn in the grass.

I don’t know if this is a young Cooper’s Hawk or a Sharp-shinned Hawk. Maybe neither? What do you think?