David Crews

Still Life: Nature’s Sheds

Some call it Nature’s Sheds, that which reminds us
of the living.  How, after the rut, just before  

winter takes hold the male White-tailed deer sheds
antlers, whole racks of tipped bone dropped  

to the needles and leaves of the forest floor, how
the forest too claims relics 

shoots of elderberry, pheasant feathers, large pine cones
that make for sturdy kindling.  Everything  

returns to dirt, mineral-rich substrate
in sediment deposit left from the last major glacial  

episode that ended in the Adirondacks nearly twelve
thousand years ago, a connective tissue  

for Black spruce, Balsam fir, loam of quartz
and potassium, feldspar and garnet 

minerals in decomposed organic matter and tiny
unseen microbes eating their way through earth  

to bedrock—how the lichen grow from it, how
the sphagnous mosses thicken in it—and the ferns  

how each spring their delicate fronds lift to fragments
of light that lilt through dense canopy 

and when the winter snows return how the ferns
always seemed to die, while the unseen rhizomes  

quarry deep between rock and root, digging
into dirt   It is a dense, already acidic, sandy soil 

a low-fertility spodosol that in decades of intense
acid rain has become fragile and susceptible  

to chemical change, soil now depleted of nutrient
saturated in salt and mobilized aluminum  

that filters to lake, fish, bird, sky.  Some believe
the earth to be much greater than ourselves 

they say it will be here even when we are gone.

This poem and painting were first exhibited together in April 2019 at NorthWind Fine Arts in Saranac Lake, NY for the gallery’s annual National Poetry Month Celebration. “Still Life: Nature Sheds” was also published on North Country Public Radio (2020)