In A Grove of Aspens

High above, their speckled white branches rise with purpose into the golden, receding light as two dark woodpeckers comb here and there for the life held in their limbs and the season's first swallows bank over head.  Lower down, their branches grow crooked and aimless in a lonely reach into dimming light where the younger ones join them, all crossing one another and twisted together into thickets and small clearings.  There is a feeling there of something unable to plainly express itself.  Something which finds its only voice in the sweet smell of leaf litter and Aspen spice hanging among the white hulls of long-downed trees tangled with the faded meadow grass.  Fallen bits of bark float in small, dark pools of snowmelt which also hold the far away reflection of the evening's last light.  Somewhere one hears the gently trickling laugh of a wren and thinks, retracing one's steps, of all the green that will soon fill that small wood and tremble in the breeze.  Crossing the old bridge home in the dusk, there is, on one side, the calm wandering purl of the creek.  To the other, there is the insistence of its short, falling rush.  And a question is carried of whether one has understood all that one needed to hear.