without issue i can feel the forest
thicken within me
build up fuel and hunger
for that incendiary spark
ah to slash and burn
plow and harrow with my ancestors
or cut down the old giants
and replace them with windmills
deadly flowers scything
the air for migrants
our doom laid out
like a meal for ravens
fates intertwining like fingers
at a lovers’ leap
a mile and a half up a mountain hollow
under the green banners of the sun
having lost the off-
spring in your step
you stare mutely back
at whatever comes
on a gorgeous morning
on an old woods road
that is itself lost
disappearing into the forest
finding again
that old quarry
where a chipmunk
has sunk a shaft
and a giant millipede writhes
her road-self
coiling and uncoiling
it’s cold
bindweed seeds get high
in a gray squirrel’s gut
Convolvus winding
into a green sky
the ghetto of goldfinches
and spiderling balloonists
boundless
squirrel like a primate ancestor
what gets traded away
for a gift of visions
which buried treasure maps
slip from memory
allowing scatter-
hoarded acorns to sprout
in your gray squirrel mind-
turned-world
woke up this morning with my shoes
gaping at me like open graves
the tapping of rain on the roof
made a rhythm I could almost feel
this isn’t walking weather
and my feet need to move
restless for no good reason
that bivalve in my chest keeps opening
a mussel gluing down its good foot
so it can rock in the current
I want to go where the river goes
to the sky or its best mirrors
which have the blues too in at least
three different ways
all of which call to me
in the melisma of a mirage
To go for a walk in the woods during the day is to participate in a fantasy of knowing through seeing. The mysterious unknown is pushed back, engendering the desire to keep walking just to see what’s around the next bend. At night, all such illusions fall away. The forest we’ve just walked through retains its essential unknowability. Without darkness, the very possibility of the wild becomes endangered.
From off in the darkness, the sound of a porcupine clacking its teeth. Against what threat, I wonder?
It goes on and on. Somebody doesn’t have much sense.
flickering
through skeletal trees
the bat’s back story
sunset
lava
on all screens
swamp tree
parodied by
its reflection
holding it
under
fire trucks
one after another
into the sunset
porcupine
grazing at dark
I mistook dysphoria for euphoria once on purpose, and it almost worked. When you live in the forest, winter—not summer—is the season of light. And so an empty plate became the full moon, and the mouse in my filing cabinet was a companion animal. I could sometimes hear her late at night, shredding my old poems for nesting material. I meanwhile was building a cenotaph out of cigarette butts. My disemboweled television watched over me while I slept.
last cigarette
as long as grass grows
or rivers run
For anyone in the rural U.S., power outages are a way of life, so one of the most surprising things about the pandemic so far is that the lights have stayed on. I stand on the ridgetop as darkness falls, gazing at a very bright Venus high in the sky; below that, a sliver of moon, the black bulk of the Allegheny Front, and then the usual display of interstate exit lights, street lights and house lights. And in a town of 5000, however Appalachian, there must be at least a few Muslim families breaking their Ramadan fast.
spring evening
scent
of a backyard grill
8:30 and already most traffic has stopped. Way off down the ridge I hear the first whip-poor-will.
night forest
a glowworm’s
slow blink
low tide
we comb the ancient peat
for footprints
drowned forest
the gull’s cry turns eldritch
undead stumps
4000 years later
sprout bladderwrack
our shared excitement
at scraps of root-bark
seaside town
all the colors of ice cream
against the Atlantic
the high street is already
lower than the beach
Tisha B’Av just past
leaning
this way or that
forest-dwelling goldenrod
not a mere patch
but a stand
the black cohosh
fairy bells
berried
under their leaves
naked-flowered tick trefoil
“leaflets three” but only
the name itches
The art museum’s smallest room
is filled with miniature landscapes.
We stop in front of each,
& my 8-year-old niece waits for me
to hoist her up by the armpits
for a five-second look.
I learn a new word from the exhibit’s title: purlieu. “A frequently visited place, an outlying district,” says Merriam-Webster’s New Collegiate. In the plural, “Confines, bounds” as well as “Neighborhood, environs.” From the French, “to go through,” it came into use in the Middle Ages, when it had a fairly specific denotation: “ME purlewe land severed from an English royal forest by perambulation.”
Later, she watches from
the back seat of the car as
a ten-dollar bill change hands. Giggles.
“They hold the money
After all-night rain,
the forest floor is soft
and full of give.
A birch log collapses
when I step on it, but the bark
arches back after I pass.
New ferns uncoil,
heads slowly dissolving
into spine and ribs.