Balance

White feather, dropped or shed.
Trace of an invisible presence,
now gone,
balanced
between the water’s surface
and the sky above.

White bird feather floating on lake with large water drop resting inside portion floating on the water. Stem is caught on pickerel weed holding it up at an angle above the water.
White Feather Floating in the Belgrade marsh in Maine

Seen up close.
It floats so sweetly
hanging by barbed threads
grasping a
pickerel weed.

From afar. It drifts
in a galaxy of blue rippled water
inside a pickerel grove
habitat for waterfowl and their prey.
From whence it came,
Loon, swan, egret.
Does it matter?

Closer still.
A moon-like drop of water
magnifies silver lines curving
into the meniscus at the water drop’s edge.

This keepsake memory of
more than “sight seeing”
to quietly absorb this non-human environment,
water not asphalt,
loons not English sparrows,
air without the fumes of car exhaust
but living smells of lake ecology,
This is enchantment.


email me at galedavison@me.com for

Framed Print: $350 (pickup in Waterville, Maine)

Paper Print with no mat: $200 for 11×14 image on 13x 19 paper (mailed in tube)

Valentine’s Day Crows

A murder of crows

settle among my trees.

Perched in clumps of five and ten

along branches,

directly outside my window.

They yell,

bobbing up and down,

looking below,

looking skyward,

calling out imagined insults or directions.

The cacophony drives me to take out my camera

to capture their show.

A white polka dotted curtain masks their many faces.

Snow is falling.

Black bodies create graphic bird shaped splotches

along the vertical lines of tree branches

rising upwards into gray skies.

Two sit closely together.

The one on the right leans towards the other.

He strokes her head gently with his beak.

She sits still.

Accepting his sweet caresses.

He is tender and patient.

I cannot see if she lifts her face to him.

The falling white snow obscures their intimacy.

Two lovers among the crowd of gawking onlookers.

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