Four Poems for Northeast Wilderness Trust
by David Crews
During the fall of 2020, I was able to visit each of what Northeast Wilderness Trust refers to as their ambassador wilderness preserves—as part of a project to “write the land.” This included individual trips to the following protected lands: Eagle Mountain (Chesterfield, NY), Binney Hill (New Ipswich, NH), Alder Stream (Atkinson, ME), and Muddy Pond (Kingston, MA)—ancestral lands of Mohawk, Abenaki, and Wampanoag peoples. The following sequence of poems includes italicized lines from Henry David Thoreau, Lao-Tzu, Martha Reben, CMarie Fuhrman, Sandra Lim, Sarah Koenig, Jean Valentine, Lauret Savoy, Masanobu Fukuoka, and Ross Gay.
David Crews
Dec, 2020
Eagle Mountain
A story they say, the shortest distance between truth
and the human heart
Not even fifty years ago
the state of New York homed only one pair of nesting
eagles
each season the clutch: shell layers thinner and thinner
—history of a species, memory of place
the land once unprotected land
the land at one time belonged to no one
what reflections befall vernal pools at night?
They are concealed in the empyrean
I walk considering Thoreau, what some say of him, but
here is another story—
find a wilderness area
now, in 2020, bring a cell phone if so inclined
find a deep woods where the way in is also the way
out
an old logging road now a path with fresh scat
so overgrown dew wets all clothes and wild raspberry
pricks arms exposed
Do not be deceived by the piping nuthatch, the insect
chirr of late summer
the land—always a series of leavings, returnings
I behold how tall the remaining conifers
how the beaver pond sits so thick the next ecosystem
has arrived
watch for snakes
remember Thoreau’s bird journals back at the car
under the driver’s seat
They are concealed in the empyrean
Always, when going rogue
a book for research, one to learn, one a variation on
a theme, one a guide
one for presence, music, beauty, one to push ethos,
one that haunts me
And I think of Walden in a box somewhere in a basement
one of only perhaps two true finished books
and his return to the pond again and again like Narcissus—
to hear pine wind, the ice cracking
Only a few miles into wilderness—such solitude, such
quiet alarm
in the idea planted that the chance of seeing another
human being
decreases exponentially with each step
and a slow walk to the next rise, and the narrative
rewrites itself—
I am a lone traveler, who carries the violence of the world
in my chest like a hurt baby bird
it has been so long I cannot tell dream from feather
They are concealed in the empyrean
an ecotone comes before the name for it
Eastern pearlshell so rare in these woods—were mountain
streams once filled with them?
Round pond, Copper pond, Clear pond
Durgan brook to Trout Pond brook
All streams flow to the sea
About forty miles west of here beyond the high peaks
Weller pond, where Martha Reben back in 1927 lived
for more than ten years to treat her tuberculosis
Later she would write her story in The Healing Woods
and The Way of the Wilderness
Nothing, for me, would ever be the same again
I must believe in a sky of eagles
have seen their flight: wing glide and widening gyre
I must carry with me the thoughts of those who came
before
how might hemlocks teach me the language of light?
What if presence came in a whisper?
To carry only the weight of a messenger: these walking
rhythms
a lone heartbeat
The pond holds a sky inside it
Binney Hill
1
Throngs of cars pull tight at Mount Watatic state
reservation
from the carriage road up Nutting hill—dried ferns
in decline
stillness of the dying season
Gunshots to the west echo off mountains and return
with more body
I hear voices in the forest
The Binney family, of lot 100, begins: captain John Binney
born 1656
who came to Hull, Massachusetts before 1682—with wife
Mercy, and two sons
styled fisherman, gentleman
family name recorded in The History of New Ipswich, New
Hampshire, 1735 - 1914, by Charles Henry Chandler
A stone wall runs a hilltop, close to state line
these could be old woods
The Wapack trail—completed in 1923 with Frank Robbins
of Rindge and Marion Davis of New Ipswich
descends toward more preserved land
Perhaps this is not the season for hanging plush bulbs in
lady slippers—Cypripedium acaule, stemless
or the dark splayed hands of Wake-robin—Trillium erectum
what once was heavily logged forest now fields a delicate
blossom of Queen Anne’s Lace, Blanket flowers, Black-eyed
Susans
a lone Hermit thrush screes once north of Binney road
chickadees scatter to hemlock, two ravens fly the ridgeline
north—their guttural
call and response
More than eleven thousand years before these ravens the
first native peoples arrived
many came to dialects of Abenaki—settlers called them
People of Dawnland
Pennacook, Cowasuck, Pequawket
who by custom did not own land, used instead by season
in need
with villages along rivers, lakes
they trapped fish in tidal waters using a weir
Connecticut, Merrimack, Saco, Androscoggin
deep water, dry wood river
What you take you always give back
By early seventeenth century small pox, influenza—
arrived
epidemics in the years 1615 to 1620 decimated Abenaki
populations
the first invasive species
From the lookout on Pratt mountain
Binney pond edges itself among the trees and leaves
a complex ecosystem in flux—
once a mountain stream moved through this valley
now bogged with sticks and mud
a swamp that someday will thicken and dry to meadows
of tall grass
2
The woods are ready
and quiet save for the group of squabbling ravens
chasing one another up and down the ridge
on New Ipswich mountain
a handsome towhee sneaks chokeberry fruit
its russet flanks in stark contrast to a black head,
red eye
a hardy sparrow that will fuel up and probably shift
south a few states from here
I marvel how they can live so far away so long as the
ecosystem fits, so long as the variables prove true
—food source, climate, water, rain
Back on Pratt mountain a Blue-headed vireo lands
in an oak
a thick eye-ring sets her apart for they often feed like
warblers
warblers, such little birds with such miraculous journeys
This vireo is late to leave
though she will fly south, farther than the towhee
The world we see never is the world that is
Maybe it is a privilege to grow old—
to find these recurring patterns of here, then gone
to leave, return
thinking: head gray-blue, white wing bars, body light
yellow
the impression of green—Vireo solitarius
sparrow from the Greek spergoulos meaning small
field bird
at one point they were just birds, this just land
and the memory of it all—life, legacy, love, voice
thinking: at one point we all will die, and what remains
The world we see never is the world that is
Stephen Laurent, also Atian, son of former chief Sozap
Lolô, alias Joseph Laurent
an Abenaki citizen born in Odanak, who moved to
ancestral lands in Intervale
and in 1995 completed a thirty-year project to translate
Father Aubery's French-Abenaki Dictionary
a language remains if other languages allow it
The story goes—
His words came smoothly, eyes focused on the soft
ground
beyond the tiny Indian store in Intervale
dressed in a fringed vest of caribou leather, red tie
beaded with a small blue bird
perhaps one of five people, they said, left in the world
who knew Abenaki words
For a photograph he removed his hat
Bear's Den: We Scalp Prices, Not People—Mohawks
of Akwesasne
the store he saved a national historic site
The world we see never is the world that is
A friend says heaven is a place where one comes
to all the knowns of a life lived
number of times you said the word the
how many leaves of grass your bare feet have touched
Speak me all the lost words of the land
No one is so tender in her scream
Lucy
your secret book
can I hear them—can it just be music?
Alder Stream
The colors are turning
here, in the most heavily logged state of the nation’s
history
stretches of I-95 go without trees
I look at the road atlas and see highways that network
northward boughs and branches
Paper birch, Gray birch, Black birch
In the distance big mountains loom where the AT nears
the end of its two-thousand mile pilgrimage
here, in the Maine woods—Abenaki ancestral lands
American beech, Balsam fir, White cedar
How and why do we know what we know?
Some say this land contains the largest grove of wild
reproducing American chestnuts
sits at the farthest northern reaches of chestnut habitat
here, at the ecotone
how light can I make myself?
Stepping through leaves spiked burrs rest just underfoot—
some dried and brown, some open, some still green
encasing delicate seed
these trees are smaller and more sick than I imagined
Blight of the American chestnut in the last hundred years
includes the loss of more than three billion trees
infected by a pathogen that colonizes a wound in the
bark
Red oak, Eastern white pine, Tamarack
The grove of chestnut sits atop a slight ridge just over
the Piscataquis river
contraptions of netting here and there to catch falling
debris—part of a study
how this land too some think proves the farthest reaches
of the blight
Penobscot river, Piscataquis river, Alder stream
alder of the genus Alnus—flowering plant, of the birch
alor, aliso, el for red, brown
Speckled alder, Red maple, Striped maple
Some researchers claim the only way to restore chestnut
populations—genetically engineered species
A single step away from the source can only lead astray
Up close and without vista the woods look imperfect
broken branches, fallen and rotting trees, half open burrs,
and fresh scat pressed and smeared on a rock
how I am drawn to fields of seeding milkweed
their pods opening to soft, silky, starlike filaments—
the coma lifting into wind
O teach me to love the mutilated world
Scientists say it is not uncommon in evolutionary history
for a species to give another species a gene
when a genetically engineered father tree is planted
near a wild mother, half the chestnut yield will carry
a blight tolerant trait
at what point will the wild chestnut tree be gone?
Quaking aspen, American elm, Black ash
So it is told that a squirrel once could travel Georgia
to Maine on only the branches of chestnut trees
Castanea dentata—American chestnut
My steps bushwhacking here are delicate for these
chestnut trees are not big
leaves now quite familiar: elongated, serrated, still
very green
I see them everywhere scattered about the dense
forest illumined in pockets of sunlight
what if I did not know to maneuver the burrs?
What living creatures does each step press into
the earth?
How obvious this love for birds someone once said
—they need no trails
to be feather-light and adrift to thermals
I could love the mutilated world
The chestnut contains over 30,000 genes of DNA—
researchers want to give it one
peacekeeping enzyme that protects the tree from
a harmful acid
I look on Alder stream and its beaver dams and wonder
which trees are mountain alder, which are speckled
these woods speak a language of water and light
and I yearn to translate what’s lost
where to praise means to save, and to preserve keeps
trees from dying
still, I know so little of life’s reckonings
The memory of what we found shapes me still
Black spruce, Eastern hemlock, American chestnut
Muddy Pond
They say winter is time for storytelling
when words fall away to dark silences—the earth
hardening, season of light
what seems like a thousand little deaths
each day, memory taking shape
So the Musk turtles dig to debris under the pond
and burying beetles burrow below frostline
pine trees creak and whistle in wind
here, at Muddy pond
in the northern reaches of the Atlantic coastal pine
barrens
Driving sounds of the highway come
not far off from wind in the trees
this globally rare ecosystem just down the street
where glacially-formed coastal plain ponds and
deeper kettle ponds
with nutrient-poor soils support stunted forests
Pitch pine—Pinus rigida
Shortleaf pine—Pinus echinata
Loblolly pine—Pinus taeda
Pond pine—Pinus serotina
barren—incapable of producing its kind, of animals
plants
As I walk the path russeted with fallen oak leaves
my fingers move delicately in the soft needles of new
white pines
the trail snakes around shoreline
a pond, unlike the river that carries life
brings life to it
—stillness of a pond, quiet pond
Nothing like the sea in continuous routine of chaos
and current
I imagine myself inside wild dune forests of lichen
and sand
Beneath the tree inside me
where kettle ponds sit tucked between hills
rising and falling thick with Pitch pine
and dried oak leaves rusted and blowing hide the firm
substrate underfoot
this hidden ecosystem just inside the coast
left in glacial retreat nearly eighteen thousand years
ago
Up the rising seaboard another four hundred miles
to the northern shores of Acadia
Beneath the tree inside me
ridgelines covered in Pitch pine
stand over a thousand feet above the level of the sea
There, root grips rock and the pines grow gnarly in
wind and winter rain
life along the coast ever evolving, in continual flux
what are the secrets of these little histories?
Where will I find myself
Beneath the tree inside me
and how will I remember the way of the land
To whom this poem is prayer
may it always give life and light
may it remain beyond my own
Eastern point, Lubec, ME / 10 Oct 2020
David Crews is a writer, editor, and wilderness advocate who currently resides in southern Vermont / ancestral lands of Mohican and Abenaki peoples. He cares for work that engages a reconnection to land and place, wilderness, preservation, nonviolence. He currently serves as managing editor for Wild Northeast.. Find David and more of his work at davidcrewspoetry.com
Northeast Wilderness Trust (newildernesstrust.org) is a non-profit land trust, founded in 2002 to fill the vacant niche of wilderness protection in the Northeast. Their mission is to conserve forever-wild landscapes for nature and people. To date, they have protected more than 41,000 forever-wild acres across New England and New York.
Other poems by David Crews:
“Kennebec River” for Kennebec Estuary Land Trust
”Liberation Farm” for Agrarian Trust and the Somali Bantu Community Association