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.
a porcupine puts
one foot in
As the crescent moon ripples and breaks apart, the mountaintop pool suddenly seems cavernous, its tree reflections trailing into the abyss. I stand to leave and the illusion passes. A bat nearly the same shade of darkness as the forest careens in and out of vision. The short path to the woods’ edge seems to have doubled in length, but this of course is another illusion. As is the bobcat quality of that snarl I just heard from the spruce grove.
The night makes everything grow: half-seen, fuzzy outlines dissolve, and the darkness itself becomes the only upward limit on size. Names and identities we wear by day become as loose-fitting as nightgowns or pajamas.
Limbs against the snow, outlined with more snow. Treetops no longer canopies but the bare nets of need. Their no-longer-rare caresses and collisions in the winter wind. The moans of the ice-bound. How tormented they’d be if they hadn’t retreated to the underworld, that silken matrix of rootlets and hyphae, to trade fermented memories of sunlight for the bones of a mouse.
winter den
a slow leak of breath
growing needles
snowy meadow
seedhead bending into
its own pit
I lost my sense of smell for just two days. When it came back, the first odor I noticed was soil, which still surprises me this time of year. When I was a kid, the only time the temperature rose above freezing in January was for a few days of warm weather toward the end of the month, a little false spring we called January Thaw.
white clippings
from my haircut
winter garden
Rachel went back to work after a ten-day self-quarantine. She had what might’ve been the common cold, though five of the other people who looked after the same special-needs person tested positive for Covid. That’s the hell of it, the not knowing whether one might be infectious or immune.
winter
afternoon moon
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
snowflakes
on my bald head
tapping woodpecker
subnivean
I tunnel through the day
half awake
Groundhog Day
the former coal town living
off a shadow
cabin fever
today’s potato flaky
as old wood
meltwater pool
the way my reflection
keeps shivering
cold moon
road-bank beech tree
skinny roots hanging on
to each other
an exclusive crowd of beeches
smart gray bark
yet to canker
inward-looking
a beech tree’s eye-
shaped scars
even by day
the beech grove retains
something of the moon
I died with the word I on my lips.
It only took a moment,
a slight pause as if for a line-
break or a comma, a panicked thought
or the time required for an 8-ball
to cross the baize. I died,
and the cities I harbor gave way
to squalid refugee camps
where the moon went
through a new phase
of never getting out of bed.
They fed it on thin broth
that tasted like a landlocked sea.
And there I floated like Moses
in my open casket waiting to be
adopted by Mother Earth—
Let me down one cat a time:
the cat that wakes me by sitting on my face
the cat that ignores me
the cat that pushes vases off of tables
the cat that was once magic but now just lies around and gets fat
the cat that kills birds out of irritation at their wings
and the cat that disappears in the middle of a sentence
like a body flung from a bridge while the soul
carries on, oblivious,
yowling about the goddamn hunter’s moon.
Anyone who was everyone was there.
I love your new work
with shadows, I exclaimed
to a wan-looking moon.
Snow doesn’t stop falling
when it hits the ground;
it just slows down for a while.
It’s like that talk-show host
who ridiculed the idea
of a day-time moon—
how I relished his show’s
slow collapse, despite
its glut of glitterati.
It doesn’t seem right,
looking at “the old moon
in the arms of the new,”
the dark part glowing
a bleary orange
with earthshine,
that we can still emit
so much radiance.