Poems by Charles Weld

Cressing With Sophia

by Charles Weld

From Canary Summer 2022

Charles lives about a half mile from the inlet to Owasco Lake, part of the Oswego River-Finger Lakes watershed which is part of Lake Ontario's greater watershed, Haudesaunee land until about 1790.

When Thoreau rowed his sister, Sophia, upriver to cress,
cress, I guess, meant picking leaves from stalks
of yellow rocket to cook like spinach, unless
the family ate raw greens which, I’ve read, is unlikely. Herb
of St. Barbara is the other name Thoreau used. The verb,
like nutting or a-berrying, part of a foraging vocabulary
that disappeared as wild fruits became property,
rights claimed by owners. He wrote I do not see clearly
that these successive losses are ever quite made up to us,
after the closing to pickers of some blueberry hill country,
the lost chances for health and happiness, not superfluous
but central to his lament. On a river outing up the Sudbury,
he, Sophia, and their aunt picked three pecks of barberry,
the river cutting cross lots, as he did on his unorthodox walks,
another practice that would have trouble surviving the century.

© Charles Weld

Five-Foot-Long Black Snake

by Charles Weld

From Canary Summer 2022

Seated on a sunny path, Thoreau startled the snake,
and then was surprised himself, when head
and half its body rising, as if preparing to strike, instead
it slid up a slender oak sapling in retreat,
climbing zig zag, twig by twig, to the tree’s top
and there, extending itself straight out two feet,
coiling around a nearby pine, not to stop,
but to swing slowly overhead, tree to tree: pine,
oak, oak, pine. The distance in a straight line
from where it left the ground: twenty-five feet. He
called aversion to snakes an unnatural antipathy,
but probably knew few neighbors would agree
or, after flooding, understand his urge to undertake
rescues, ferrying serpents in his boat to safety,
ignoring the belief in their innate chicanery.