Free Following the Water by David M. Carroll Page B

a backdrop for human dramas. So many voices, so many languages beyond human tongues, are never listened to. We are in fact overwhelmingly out of our senses. Our eyes are open for such a brief time, our appearance on Earth between two unfathomable sleeps. Are we to sleepwalk through it?
    I edge my way out of the Tangle's final snarls. In snagging my sweater and catching my hair, the alders, winterberry, and swamp rose seem intent on keeping me here. Late in a long, slow day of wading I settle into a thigh-deep pocket, most of it mud, among the alders. I haven't the energy to immediately struggle out; it is one of those occasions when I am just as happy to be held in one place for a time. I am not far from the water's outermost curling, as it turns in a shallow arc along what might appear to be the upland border. But the wetlands extend beyond the margins of this shimmering slide of visible water. On the far side of the alder carr that has detained me rises a swamp composed not of shrub thickets but of trees, a red maple swamp. The trees are radiant in the last lingering slants of sunlight that play across their forty-foot crowns.
    A flock of common grackles settles noisily into the high red maple canopy, each one a jet black bird silhouette distinct in the smoky blur of upper branches and the crowning glow of red-sienna twig tips, bright red buds, and flowers. Swamp sparrows continue their flitting and calling in the alder and royal fern mounds darkening around me. Water glides by in a silent sheet, brightening as the alders go black. Bound for lower ground, it swirls away from the upland ascents, its surface a constant quivering of tiny braids and voiceless riffles—alive and ever moving at the springing of the year. Here I will turn away from the water, which moves on among the alders, a broad silver slide finding its way to the permanent stream.
    In its final run this lowland drift is channeled into a network of deeper cuts through belts of alder on wetland plateaus, sharply defined races banked by unyielding root and turf. Here the constricted runnings become forceful enough to keep their courses clear of sediments, cutting down to underlying sand. As the great depression slopes downward to its lowest point, the bed of Alder Brook, water quickens in these sluiceways and takes on the voice of a babbling brook, as though eager to get on with the race to the greater stream.
    As daylight diminishes, the peep-frog chorus intensifies in the backwaters of a fen a quarter mile away. With raucous clamor and a rushing wind of wing beats a flurry of
grackles lifts off from the topmost canopy of the red maple swamp. In the quieting that follows, I hear again the drift of evensong from their red-winged cousins on the far side of the wetland mosaic. The season, like the water glimmering all around, extends before me.

A DAY IN THE SHADOW OF A PINE
Junto a las aguas quietas
Sueño y pienso que vivo.
[By quiet waters
I dream and think that I live.]
    â€”Luis Cernuda
    19 APRIL. I touch the morning sun where it touches the furrowed and plated bark of the pine. Sunlight finds its way through the tree's dense crown to warm the trunk and enhance its resinous scent. Sun warms the color as well, shifting small illuminations, washes of gold over lavender-gray here and there in the prevailing cool, deeper violet cast of white pine bark in shadow. How many suns are there in the
day? Sunrise, morning sun, the sun at its zenith, afternoon sun, sunset, and all those intermediate points. There is a sun for every season and all gradations of them. This pine has not yet attained half its potential girth and height, but still the sun of nearly a century's seasons has played over its bluish green crown, marking the turnings of all those days.
    Touching trees has always grounded me. Before I knew their names I knew them by their feel, by the colors and textures of their leaves and bark, the ground on which they stood. As I spent nearly all my time