J.J. Smith's "Numbers"

Encircled by an arrangement of barns and sheds and other farm houses now converted to art galleries, cafes, and gift shops

my eyes focus on the tops of trees far off. In Nashville, landscapes feel swept aside, the acreage owned by freeways or rich estates. The remainder is in the hills; there, the trees gather, bronze-cinnamon heads peeping up from thickets of deadened redcedars, locusts, hemlocks…The heads, their color clinging to life through the cold…almost a rusted copper-brass like the buttons you see on dark jeans. Longer I look, I see green tinges.

On the tourist-hangout-outskirts, the ground hops and chirrups with dark olive-gold warblers. Their miniature, pointed beaks nip at gravel and things squirming in the soil, things tinier than them.

I can hear the hidden wildlife scavenging through scraps of a fire pit and flipping through tree limbs. I hear the many workings of Nature, my own workings with pen on paper on the picnic table with the heat of the relentless Sun down upon us all (and what is Sol but merely a labor of the elements? Are we any more than such?)