east of the fog

In “Gathering Moss”, Robin Kimmerer writes, “I teach bryology in the summer, wandering through the woods, sharing mosses.  . . . On the trail and in the lab, I like to listen to my students talk. Day by day, their vocabulary stretches and they proudly refer to leafy green shoots as “gamentophytes” . . . Having words for these forms makes the difference between them so much more obvious. With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.”

In one of George Orwell’s essays he notes that over time where once people passing by could name the flowers, at some point they merely point and say pretty. Some of this loss is due to fast travel by car, some by disinterest, and some by not having an old person to walk the child through the place saying, “This is bloodroot; that is a beech.”

Walking through the ruins

on your way to work

that do not look like ruins

with the sunlight pouring over 

the seen world

like hail or melted

silver, that bright

and magnificent, each leaf

and stone quickened and specific in it,

and you can’t hold it, 

you can’t hold any of it. Distance      surrounds you…

From Paper Boat : New and Selected poems by Margaret Atwood

I found my father’s and my own dog tags in a drawer the other day. I don’t know where my grandfather’s might have gotten to.