i'll begin with a poem that is set in winter time right behind this house this day in january at the window then sunlight dapples the kitchen floor where i stand and watch our children drag their sleds to the crest of the pasture hill once there they lie prone poised a moment pasture its sloping hello and how much they're wary lambs shaped to ride the winter landscape this bit of earth who sees no terrain they know like the swells and valleys of their own bodies with each downhill slide i begin to feel against the length of my own flash that land of childhood those north carolina sand hills i could still run down arms held wide as if to embrace the air the warming sun the spreading m landscape of memory as near as my body shape moving yet in sinew blood flow buried in from the wind the past your hero the format is we indeed but never ours as it is our children's belonging to them this day in january in the shapes of their bodies our way is this pastures grooves they carve through winters of rhymes this is an april early spring three moves emerged from the dark woods edge one hawking shape after the other their tracks soil as if they were dinner guests arriving just in time for the main course there both the heads turned toward the light of the dining room window where we sat with lifted for extra begin the evening meal dinner cooled on their plates as we peered into the gathering dusk and to move abreast their opaque gaze is fixed on us shifting their weight from side to side they settle their hooves into rain softened earth only yards away tell with her calf rocking slightly on it's been the legs bringing up the rear a young bull tried from time to time to melt the can out until she turned toward him pendulous muzzle lowered as if to remind him of where he was and the need to mind his table manners in those brief moments of fading light who were hosts this table and who the guests dissolved into mists curling from the cooling earth as three moves held us rapt drawn into their ancient inscrutable as before they met moved away and melted like apparitions into the night the next poem is also a spring poem it's called spring's sweet harvest it's the last weekend in march annual open house for vermont's sugar makers where neighbors and families gather to celebrate and taste this we dissed of spring harvests its clear liquid siphoned from the maples sugar bush sloping across the state only this year's not good so far after a run of two warm springs this year's to cope with many places yet in wetter grip freezing the sap made flesh in these fluctuating seasons of foreboding only two days or so of a steady flow of maple  and music keeping step with the man walking his dog along a dirt road lined with ancient maples their limbs nor old in defenders curling over the roadside this annual sap living the life blood of vermont sugar makers the maples flaming color each out on a similar for earth's that are no motion the planets turned toward and in doing that marks the beginning in the maples sweet bleeding soon they say in forty years or so with such a radek warming and cooling for months maples will no longer yield their amber ago with winter's deep and sustained cold to stir into motion saps life giving flood such changes in our climate then may signal the end ever to boil loss of something akin to the nature of our own flesh and bones the blood coursing invading and arteries through the trunks and limbs of our bodies like a maple sap coursing down word into its roots and our bodies and the sugar maple both fonda and flora of an earth crow's mark for hayden caruso sipping a little wine on your country porch our gazes turned toward green hillsides as the three of us talked a bit taking in vermont's may fragrance with the insistent sounds of jazz pushing their pulsating rhythms out the open twenty years later and last forever the runs and riffs of what you played for us if skip were here he would know benny carter from sidney bis memory for sounds and words a marvel to the end i want it all back those two men and our occasional words inclined toward notes spilling into distant pastures to bring everything into a glittering fusion of body place and s and the last when is it goes to fall to autumn division and remainder the large maple closest to the house has long etched its odd twig patterns on the brittle cold panes of a bedroom when that now the tree expert insists it must come down his voice drones on about its rot its threat to the house in a high wind and his wide gestures spread the brain over years of road salt exhaust fiends the trees great age soon that sugar maple lies on the grass while chainsaws swarm over its parts like a county of black ants dismembering a golden butterfly until the tree becomes what we can hope love carry and stack then measure bahaa cords our only way of coping with the diminished