More than a sighting or an encounter, it was a visitation from a massive meteor. We smelled it burn up before us.
Green Apples
Green apples were past ripening on the ground, the blackbird had bedded down in the reeds, and crickets had began their evening song. A point of light over the trees dimmed and brightened as my brother and sister took another shot at the rim, and the evening star rose over the clouds.
The light wavered in the heavy air; first red, then green, then blue and gold. We turned together as it expanded into a disk and in that instant the tree tops began to glow and the woods beneath lit up as if from a fire inside.
Crackling and hissing, a great meteor was dragging a wave of sound and light straight toward us.
Bursting onto the field with immense speed, ignoring fences and hedgerows, through the milkweed and mustard and butterfly weed, through cattails and reeds as if a piece of the sun had come falling to their burrow. To the possum and persimmon, and the blackbird’s nest, silencing frogs and owls, nightjars and crickets.
Lighting the silver-sided barn and our faces in a flash of apple green it burst in the air with a final C-R-A-C-K.
And in the pressing silence we stood still, as its pungent heavy metal scent reached out to everything in the closing dark.
Fireflies
In the Amazon basin in Peru we visited a part of the Marañon River that had not been disturbed for more than a generation. At night we went out on a johnboat on a smaller branch. Beder held a spotlight that enabled us to see the eyes of crocodiles as they floated at the surface of the dark water. White eye-shine meant White Crocodiles, red meant Black.
As me moved about we saw possums and rats, tree snakes and fishing bats. There were fish too, startled by the spotlight, jumping straight up out of the water and falling into our boat.
Slowly we entered a branch just big enough for our boat to pass. Below the surface was a strange sight- a glowing patch of light, vague at first, but then more distinct as points of light nestled in the moss and plants of the stream. Like gliding silently over a city from above in the darkness. Like visitors to strange hearths, witnesses to some sacrament we were not privy to. Nymphs glowing in the green like beacons, jewels dropped into a surreal pool, or angels offering a glimpse of eternity.
Beder said that they were fireflies.
Leaving us all dumbstruck and still, as something revealed in that dark water assured us in our trespass that we were not out of place.
Tarantula Wasp
In Arizona my brother sat with other soldiers in the bleachers at a football game. After a while, someone noticed a struggle in the shade of the bleachers between a tarantula and a wasp. Everyone in his corner began watching the battle in the dust.
Eventually the tarantula succumbed and the wasp gathered it together by moving it clumsily across the ground. She headed toward a leg of the stands and then onto it with the giant spider in tow.
And when she reached a point on the leg only she could know, she stopped, gathered herself together for a moment –and then dropped.
In that moment of falling down, a hurtling mass of legs and buzzing wings she flew.
In a graceful arc she swept past the ground and then over it just above her shadow outward into the blinding white light of day.
Click on the gold link above or on the embed below to see the video “Green Apples” from the Snow on Water YouTube Channel Poetry playlist.
