Well Bottom Blues

What brought a boy from Bayou St. John
to the frigid edge of the Red River of the North,
on a sunny, windless 10° day in February,
to strap on bentwood & gut beavertail snowshoes
& crunch contentedly into the solitary snow?

There was a single tree on an isolated spit of land
behind the adjacent subdivision where only I went.
It was a broad, round place connected to the city
only by a narrow strip of land & so left bare

except for that tree. I never thought to learn genus
or species. As a child I lived much in nature but
had no outdoorsy or gardening mad elders
to teach me the Adamic approach to the world.

I treasured this tree for its isolation & my own
determination to reach it on every trip down
the riverside park, the snow unbroken by
the cross-country skiers on their polished loipe.

Up from the bottoms crabwise in massive Eskimo
clown shoes, then break fresh trail off across
the perfect sheet of isolated, virgin snow
to march once around & stop, to remove my

outer glove to put my thin-clad  hand against
its sculpted bark which matches the sastrugi
the wind carved around it. I would stand there,
seeking a tactile or electrical connection

to the thin sheaf of life between bark & heartwood,
phloem, cambium, sapwood; words I just learned,
but alway understood to be the the plumbing
between green grass & green leaves overhead.

With my back to the city I looked out across
this companionless spot, the trees beyond,
the bottomland with its peopled trail invisible
& across the Red to the primitive park beyond it.

I thought then of birchwood canoes & pelts,
of coonskins caps crossing into vistas beyond
the ordinary, into the wide, open spaces that drew
Scandinavia’s sons to this fertile but frigid place.