Small Sweet Ransom

Each autumn hard not to muse

I have been pondering raccoons and poop, theirs and others’. This morning we found smatterings of white with dark squiggles, spread out like a modernist painting on the sidewalk beneath the huge golden willow. Not owl, but perhaps an immature bald eagle, like the one that brings on the magpies’ rancor.

But instead of writing something about poop or a new musing about my relationship with raccoons, I want to share this poem. I wrote it (mostly) in 2023. If you read all the way to the end, and gaze at a fall photo of our crab-apple, there will be an older raccoon poem as well.

Small Sweet Ransom

she waits on the profligate

unseemliness calls it

crab-apple the overseer

to her garden with its

lavender plastic trolls

a bird bath for what else but

the profusion of clouds

a solitary Eden she seeks

a safeguard

fence stained lilac pruned

only as needed

nothing comes easy

the years like a long marriage

the seasons pared down by

freeze and thaw run-off and hard clay

one hand to the azimuth of the sun

she shifts with the wind

accepts what thrives on adversity

harbors a vigilance to frost cloths

refuses to net the tree

she leaves

the fruit to the chittering

waxwings their exaction

this spring tithe

before the birds’ return to harvest

before the apples fall

to ferment

where the hens squabble

peckish and righteous

before yellow jackets descend

for their small sweet ransom

before dying

Our Backyard Sept 2025

We are asked by conservation groups to harvest all the fruit of this ancient crab-apple, to remove temptation for bears this time of year, so the bears don’t become “problem” bears. Since 1992, we have only had one bear climb into this tree. During three decades all manner of other critters have eaten of its fruit. Even today the chickadees and magpies are picking away at the rotten fruit, what freeze-thaw does this time of year. Perhaps the bigger “problem” is humans.

And in lieu of a new bit of prose about raccoons, who are also attracted to our yard by the bird feeder,”The Gaze,” which was published in “Untrapped,” a chapbook edited by Matt Daly and published by Wyoming Untrapped, in 2019 (TBD).

The Gaze

The raccoons arrive

a hiss out of the dark

that one summer, night

pirates staring you down

from the mast of the golden

willow. They arrive

on your private island

bringing the treasure

of a gaze, the nursery

of themselves. You count

their eyes as challenge:

one two and then three.

Your sleepless sleep

scares up a coop of

slaughtered hens.

The trap is tuna baited

for the hungry kits & sow.

You watch the captured

mother claw what she can

from beneath her cage.

You cover the bars,

glove your hands,

drive across three

bridges and release her,

and then two and three.

Two years on their gaze

holds steady, though raccoons

never return to your island,

and the hens grow old and

fat, stop laying eggs and die.

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And I close with two images of an Inky Cap, Coprinopsis atramentaria, emerging on Sept 29 and already “inking” up on Sept. 30.

Thank you for reading my mid-November musings.

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