IN A SMALL STORE in New England today, I saw a basket of freshly harvested fiddlehead ferns. This is a delicacy of spring that one can never find in a mainstream market, the unfurled fronds of ostrich ferns gathered from local woods, suggestive of a tightly-curled marine animal, just removed from its shell, fished from the forest tides. They reminded me of the Ted Hughes poem Fern:

Here is the fern’s frond, unfurling a gesture,
Like a conductor whose music will now be pause
And the one note of silence
To which the whole earth dances gravely.

The mouse’s ear unfurls its trust.
The spider takes up her bequest.
And the retina
Reins the Creation with a bridle of water.

And, among them, the fern
Dances gravely, like the plume
Of a warrior returning, under the low hills,

Into his own kingdom.

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