Tony Whedon

Each time I take a walk the natural world collapses in on itself and what was old becomes new again. Then comes the poem reiterating itself as I make my way up a mountain to a waterfall, a second-rate calendar of a waterfall beneath a cloud-broken sky. All is waste and decay, a mink’s carcass rotting on a stream bank, two dead baby robins in a straw nest, their beaks gaping wide. An early thaw, a month past Valentine’s Day, and below a river sprawls into the blue of second-growth forest and untended fields, rain sputtering on overhangs of beech and maple. Back home, I try to sort things out, and I end up writing about a Greek Island where I lived decades before. How do these landscapes synchronize? Greek history is written in the hills behind my house in flakes of obsidian chert and broken arrowheads, one epoch piled on another. My pencil slips on the page as I try to take it all in.