Outside the booms of cedar,
The fish-hawks drop at noon;
When night comes trailing up the stars,
We hear the ghostly loon;
And watch the herons swing their flight
against the crimson moon.

The Wind Tongues

I wandered in the woodlands where the red glades begin,
And a wind in every tree-top was talking small and thin: 
“The dead hand of Winter is knocking at the door,
And the white froth of flowers will float no more.

  “The gray ranks of grasses are bared of their bees,
  Their voices sound like falling spume between the leaden seas;
  We hear beyond the alders where the long swamps lie
  The creak of broken rushes and the last snipe’s cry.”

  And I marked the poignant sorrow in each high tree tongue,
  Conferring there above me where the blue moss hung;
  Till anguish grew from far away and broke in sullen roar,
  As when a smoking surf meets a rock-ribbed shore.

Musk-Rats

  When the mists move down from the barren hill,
  To roll where the waters are black and chill,
  When the moonlight gleams on the lily-pads
  And even the winds are still.

  The musk-rats slip from the clammy bank,
  Where the tangled reeds are long and dank,
  Where the dew lies white on the iris bed,
  And the rushes stand in rank.

  Their black heads furrow the stagnant stream,
  While the water breaks in a silver gleam,
  Till it joins the reeds where the night lies hid
  And the purple herons dream.

  Through the mist and the moon’s mysterious light
  They hear the honking geese take flight,
  Threshing up from the arrow-heads
  As the lonely East grows white.

The Kill

  Black and white the face of night,
    And roar the rapids to the moon;
  Dust of stars beyond the bars,
    And mirthless laughter of the loon.

  Swirling blades through inky shades,
    And ghostly shadows slipping by;
  Clogging beds of arrowheads,
    And jagging spruce tops in the sky,

  Rasping groans of birchen cones
    Re-answering from shore to shore;
  Through the hush the snapping brush—­
    Then silence, and the stars once more.

  Mutters slow, appealing, low,
    The throaty pleading of the bark;
  Roar of might that rends the night—­
    His body bulking through the dark.

  Then the white, cruel tongue of light
    Leaps stinging in his startled eyes;
  Red and black the night falls back,
    The rocking echo drifts and dies.

On the Marshes

  Out on the marsh in the misty rain,
  The air is full of the harsh refrain;
  The long swamps echo the beat of wings;
  The birds are back in the reeds again.