These dense saplings are part of a wall of woods near Beverly Beach. I like the dark mass and the drumbeat of their repeating trunks. The bright sky pokes through in its own pattern. They stand tight against the jagged trench erosion has cut. People have strung delicate strings to mark the division, as if they could hold back the trees, or as if we might not notice that the ground is missing there. A funny, futile, beautiful necklace for the woods. A marker that things have changed.

      I love these patchy trunks. They repeat and repeat in a line, but the whole line is turning. They lean in unison out over the hole made by the road. The light on the dirt and the light through the limbs squirms like the ragged grass at their feet. Everything is wiggling. Colors aren’t fixed. And someone has tied ribbons to some of the crowd of saplings. They are marked for some change, just about to come.

      At the top of this hill, the people have planted a handful of skinny fruit trees. There’s a fragile fence that was put up to mark the trees as important, or maybe to keep them safe. The pickets look more like counting marks, or maybe a music score. There is a delicate white ribbon, maybe an electric fence? that is strung a little farther out. It gets no respect from the wild, heaving grass that grows there, or from the three cows that eat the grass.