MARCH DAYS 



You hear the loud cackle of a logcock 

 making the daily round of his preserves, 

 but you are not likely to get more than a 

 glimpse of his black plumage or a gleam 

 of his blood-red crest. 



By rare luck you may hear the little 

 Acadian owl filing his invisible saw, but 

 you are likelier to see him and mistake 

 him for a clot of last year's leaves lodged 

 midway in their fall to earth. 



The forest floor, barred and netted with 

 blue shadows of trunks and branches, is 

 strewn with dry twigs, evergreen leaves, 

 shards of bark, and shreds of tree-moss 

 and lichen, with heaps of cone scales, 

 the squirrel's kitchen middens, the 

 sign of a partridge's nightly roosting, 

 similar traces of the hare's moonlight 

 wanderings, and perhaps a fluff of his 

 white fur, showing where his journeys 

 have ended forever in a fox's maw. 



Here and there the top of a cradle 

 knoll crops out of the snow with its 

 patches of green moss, sturdy upright 

 stems and leaves and red berries of win- 

 tergreen, as fresh as when the first snow 

 covered them, a rusty trail of mayflower 

 leaves, and the flat-pressed purple lobes 

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