Following the Water by David M. Carroll Page A

moving day. There is recording and there is experiencing. On some occasions I make notes, but today I transcribe nothing. There is that which cannot be transcribed, cannot be set down or held in any way. I can bear witness, but I cannot truly catch the April light, the wind, the water, or in any real way capture the turtle who passes by, take hold of the frog chorus ... the immersion is intangible, the experience ineffable. It is like making love. I can only wait for it to circle back and go again to meet it. It is making love.
    I stand in one of those places where I can see the world devoid of human presence, my own species gone entirely. In sunlight and by moonlight the shadow of the pine would continue for its time to wheel in its slow seasonal circles. The wind would be the same, the water streaming by. The ever-indifferent seasons would follow their course. The profoundly heavy burden of the global human footprint would be absorbed. The deep disruption of what was here before
Homo sapiens
and of what might have been without our species' appearance would be forgotten in the ongoing. The sun, the moon, and the stars would notice nothing. No god would grieve. There would be a return to an ancient silence.
    A snake's head rises from dead leaves and dried sedge: slender head, slender neck, jet eye set with sunlight. His
black-tipped scarlet tongue flickers; the rest of him is as still as a stick. Then there is a rhythmic swaying from side to side, his head fixed on a neck held stiff, and then a slow bobbing of the head as the swaying continues, followed by a fluid pouring of life taut in snakeskin, a magic movement with no outward sign of how it is achieved, as though water had become reptile and could flow independently of gravity. A garter snake trails himself among twistings of running swamp blackberry to a frozen-rope spell, his anterior fourth upright, head leveled horizontally.
    A catbird's call and a brief, solitary piping from a peep frog is followed by the almost whispered trill of a gray treefrog. The wind that talks in trees speaks pine in my ear. The mingled twittering of warblers and emphatic calls of a yellowthroat come closer, almost to my very shoulder, as my stillness endures. The snake has not moved in seven minutes. The intentness of his gleaming eye—no tongue flicking now—seems pure listening. The wind whispers at times in dry leaves, but I hear it mainly in the high trees, soughing in the pine, swishing in red maple canopies just flowering, not yet leafed out. The snake curls in a graceful arc and slips out of sight beneath fallen leaves and branches.
    Above the fawn of fallen leaves, journal pages from last year's seasons scattered about, pressed down by months of snow for the spring sun to open and read, dull green begins to replace the wine reds and deep maroons of winter in the
perennial leaves of the running swamp blackberry vines. My left hand reaches out and holds a gray birch sapling, slowly rotating on its agreeable chalky warmth and slender, satisfyingly geometric roundness.

    Studies of a yellowthroat.
    To move with a day as a shadow passes over the earth, to breathe at the pace of its passing ... I give my shadow
to the pine's; at intervals cloud shadows take both of ours away. In the pine shadow's outer arc, shade dances away at times and the sun's warmth splashes upon me. Against the trunk I am in the cool heart of the shadow. As the afternoon lengthens, the pine tree's shady silhouette comes to fit almost exactly over the tussock sedge pool, all but its easternmost end. A strong wind has come up and fairly roars in the treetops, gently rocking the winterberry from time to time. The day begins to slip away. I think, at times, of loves other than landscapes.

TRANSFORMATION
    F OLLOWING WHAT appears to be an endless caravan of mayfly larvae swimming against the flow, a teeming migration departing from a scroll pond in the floodplain, I track my way up the little brook they are