They were not on the maps.

Notes of their known habitats

recorded nothing

here or hereabouts.

I knew them shy, prized,

arboreal,

from the realm of heraldry.

Were they real at all,

I wondered, till I stood,

a spellbound witness,

downwind of a pair of them.

To have watched them is a richness

I’ve hoarded

of all my days and doings

as they tied and tied again

the tangles of their to-ings

and fro-ings in the range

of a fallen fir-tree’s roots

and I read their conjured script

in the hint of dark July recruits.

And once I touched one.

Car-struck in a storm,

its body warm, its nose-tip cool

as a single boss in a swarm

of blackberries. Years afterwards

I stepped one’s trail

in the small relief

of frost which had to fail

in the morning shadows

of the grazing’s edge

where it survived, alone

in the margins, fast in a pledge

to thrive and glow

when it emerged, a denizen

of dusk, from nest or mossy hollow,

to flower, now and then again,

in light.