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The Shapes of Leaves

Ginkgo, cottonwood, pin oak, sweet gum, tulip tree:
our emotions resemble leaves and alive
to their shapes we are nourished.

Have you felt the expanse and contours of grief
along the edges of a big Norway maple?
Have you winced at the orange flare

searing the curves of a curling dogwood?
I have seen from the air logged islands,
each with a network of branching gravel roads,

and felt a moment of pure anger, aspen gold.
I have seen sandhill cranes moving in an open field,
a single white whooping crane in the flock.

And I have traveled along the contours
of leaves that have no name. Here
where the air is wet and the light is cool,

I feel what others are thinking and do not speak,
I know pleasure in the veins of a sugar maple,
I am living at the edge of a new leaf.

-Arthur Sze, 1998

This is crane week (like shark week, only less violent). I got a job for summer-into-fall raising and tracking whooping cranes (I promise you it's cool), and I will be going to the International Crane Foundation and other Baraboo-area conservation-related places this weekend with the conservation biology class I T.A. for (we will also be counting sandhill cranes for the Annual Midwest Crane Count). So I went on the internet and looked for a poem about cranes. There aren't very many good ones. There aren't very many, period. Especially because anything about non-bird cranes was out.

Hopefully I will bring my camera and not be embarrassed like I was when I went on this field trip two years ago as a student, so there will be some pictures when I get back. This month has been a little anemic when it comes to pictures.