January 24, 2010

We park across from the Golf Clubhouse, stopping to notice for the first time lichens growing on the stones on the Lick Creek bridge. Stopping for a moment and then we walk into the woods through milky light from a weak sun.

Just inside the woods, the trenched path is filled with water, water stretches as far as we can see. A robin at the edge tosses leaves to the side, looking for worms in the wet ground.

The further we go, the more robins we see, drawn there by the soggy, unpoisoned ground.

We walk carefully, along the trails dryer edge, along the submerged stretches. At other places the trail has been churned to a muddy slog by feet – human and dog – and bicycle tires.

Looking up through a tangle of bare limbs, I see a moon white twisting sycamore tree.

Nearby a red cardinal chips on a fallen tree trunk.

Escaping the trail turned creek, we step out onto the asphalt path that connects the two eastern golf link, dodging long puddles in the shallow parts. Beside the path, a sycamore stands, its peeled bark caught mid-fall by poison ivy vines.

Back in the woods, we stumble across a jumble of limbs, piled there after a storm. Mushrooms grow on one of the limbs, half of them pointing their thin top edges north, half pointing south, as neat divided as parted hair.

Maybe it’s the wet and the warmer weather over the last week, but there is so much lichen growing in the woods, growing on the sides of living and dead trees, over roots on the ground.

This place is so still and open, even though it’s in the middle of Memphis.

A male goldfinch bobs past, lands on a thin limb. It’s still early in the year and his feathers have just the faintest green glow.

Throughout the walk, we keep noticing swelling buds, and early leaf shoots, young and wine red.

At another place we find, mostly buried in the leaves, a green shoot, like some blind bald caterpillar lifting itself out of the ground.

The trail is wet, and the soggy low areas and drier upland trails make me aware of the shape of the woods below my feet.

Walking along the eastern edge of the woods and the shrieks of children on the playground along East Parkway slice through the bare undergrowth and find us here. Somewhere deeper into the woods, a hidden bird gives a throaty laugh.

We turn away from the sounds of children, walking toward to the center of the woods, stopped by a black cherry, an old gash in its bark, its scar faded to ashen gray.

We walk.

Past tiny orange-brown mushrooms growing in the hollow spaces of a fallen log.

We find other mushrooms, some dry and brown, some white-fleshed with red borders.

On one tree, shelved mushrooms glow green with lichen.

Nearby, shoots from underground bulbs erupt from the leaves.

In the leafless winter, we see old grape vines dangling from high tree limbs, their original supports gone now, making them look as though they have grown backwards, starting on the tree and slowly reaching their way down to root themselves into the ground.

In another place, a dead vine binds two briars together.

Nearby, sunlight fired the leaves of a cherry laurel.

We walk through the afternoon, until we find ourselves on the other side of the woods, on the road closest to the parking lot beside the Greensward.

Sweet gum balls lay scattered on the pavement.

Leaving, we walk along the road, on the gravel path skirting the golf course, watching the clouds drift over us.

Words by Stephen Black

Photos by Jenn Allmon

January 17, 2010

Winter reveals all that is broken in the woods.

For example:
a tall dead tree,
the lowest and only surviving limb
maybe 25 feet high,
stands witness


beside its snapped top,
which lies on the ground in pieces
like a shattered attic statue.


Another tree trunk lies near the trail,


woodpecker holes bored in rows along its side.


The ground is saturated from the thaw and yesterday’s rain.
Muddy water squishes up beneath every step.

The further we go into the woods,
the less muddy it gets,


but throughout the woods lie deep puddles
in the craters of downed trees
who’ve otherwise disappeared with time.


In spite of the mud, people have come out to the park,
dog paw prints and shoe prints stamped into the mud.


Human voices echo through the edge of the woods:
an agonized sasquatch yell from the golf course,
a triumphant group yell from the Greensward,
a teenage girl on a cellphone trailing behind her mother
(She says, “We’re on the trail”).

And people are not the only increased
kind of animal life in the woods. There are more birds
than usual: mostly sparrows, woodpeckers, robins,
chickadees and blue jays.

From time to time we can hear blue jay distress
cries from somewhere in the woods, hidden.




White fungi, each individual aureole
like round ice crystals reaching out thin tendrils,
stretches down a thin dead tree’s barkless trunk,
which provides a temporary rest for another dead tree,
this one fallen, propped in a crotch
near the top of the broken trunk.



A little further along, a thin living leaning tree
bears the black spiraling scar of a vine
that has long since died or been pulled loose.


Along the trail are tangled vines and briars.


On one tree, vines loosely twist around one another,

like a braided rope unraveling,
swagging from the trunk.



A fragment of dead
copper-colored vine wraps
around a green briar,
like an Egyptian snake bracelet.



From time to time we pass nubby barked trees,
looking like so many imitation Angkor Wats.

On another tree, a depressing display
that only the most love-blinded nature lover can appreciate:



bright green English Ivy
and ropy, hairy poison ivy vines intertwined.


And then.
A nearby distress cry from jays is the first sign.

I think at first that maybe someone
on the trail ahead of us has a dog
that has upset the jays,
but a huge swoosh of wings reveals the truth:
a barred owl,
now perched on a limb,
watches us where we have stopped still.


The owl is silent
and we watch each other
for awhile,
in silence,
none of us moving more than necessary,
for maybe five minutes.

I try my best to silence my thoughts
and not let them interfere with what is here
at this moment,
to stand still instead and experience:
the round head and ringed eyes,
the streaked belly.
The mottled wings.
The feeling of being studied
so coolly,
so closely.


By something so unworldly,
so far removed from this world
of golfers and cars and cell phones.

Until at last it decides
it has had enough of us and flies away,
south and west of us.
We try to follow it,
only to lose it in the tangle of limbs,
and giving up at last we walk away.

Neither one of us has seen an owl out here before.

Walking on the trail,
I remember the pileated woodpecker
from a couple weeks ago,
and for a moment I get mystical,
or maybe it’s just sentimental,
and I can’t help thinking that simply
by making ourselves present,
we are creating a space for these animals
to make themselves known to us.

But there’s too much to see and hear
and feel
to fool with mysticism in the woods.

Maybe it’s the wet,
but the lichens look greener than usual.




A trunk lies beside the path,
looking like some petrified ancient frog,
its surface whorled like driftwood,
the lichen making it look frog green.


At a place where the woods are edged
by a trail and the abandoned roadway,


we cross a ditched creek,
green lichen growing along its stone sides.

Back into the woods as soon as we can find a path:


Long fronded lichens on top of a downed tree,
the bottom side rowed with thin mushrooms,
chocolate brown on the trunk side, tan on the underside.



A jumble of logs,
tossed into something like a pile beside the trail.
Lime green lichen and rusty orange fungi,


their colors almost too intense to believe
they’re natural,
grow on one discarded log.

Another log hosts mushrooms,
one of them uncannily shaped like a human

– though it may be closer to the Michelin man.

Along the trail, we come across a scaly-barked persimmon tree,

its fruit long ago gleaned
and I make a note
to come back this way in the fall
and get my share
before the possums and the squirrels
and the raccoons
can eat them all.


Nearing the wood’s edge
we hear the owl cry for the first time.

It had been silent the whole time
we had watched each other
and while it was flying away.

We stop, listen, move on.

But not for long.

A few feet further on the trail we are stopped.
There, on the leaves in the middle of the trail,
someone has dropped a gold cigarette lighter,
an old-fashioned zippo lighter
like my pawpaw used to carry,
heavy with a flip top
and thumb-wheel to strike the flint.


Etched onto the side facing up is an owl.




Words by Stephen Black
Pictures by Jenn Allmon

January 10, 2010

A cold afternoon after a week of bitter cold.

Rainbow Lake, on the edge of the woods, is frozen

except where water spills over the concrete ledge.

A dog is fetching a tennis ball

on the pond’s surface. Earlier, some brave soul,

now anonymous except for the swirling

gouges of her blades, skated along the lake, wisely

hanging close to this southern pond’s edge.

Someone or something

must have fallen through a day or so ago

and though the water has refrozen over the spot, the ice

still carries the memory of its shattering: jagged pieces

of old, cloudy ice lie jumbled, embedded in clearer, newer ice.

In the cold air of the woods sounds carry:

the unending susurrus of cars,

people calling their dogs,

bird trills,

fussing birds,

the ringing of a nearby church bell,

the chirr of woodpeckers,

the voices of two men improbably

dressed in hunter’s camo and wearing balaclavas.

The frozen ground is concrete hard along the main trails,

crumbly-crunchy on the narrow, lesser-traveled side trails.

The dead are always present in a real woods:

so many trees lie on their sides.

After standing so tall for so long they are slowly rotting themselves

back to earth.

One tree’s fall dug a deep crater now matted

with dead leaves and the remnants of last season’s

undergrowth, and the soil is still packed in the matrices

of its roots. And it’s hard to imagine a time when the crater

will ever be filled in again, at least not naturally.

Snow lies in the ridges of each downed tree trunk.

Snow lies sprawled on the green moss and heaped

on the dead leaves of the forest floor.

Snow lies piled on the shelves

of mushrooms growing out of rotting trunks.

Almost everything leafy and green left in the woods

has shriveled and wilted in the cold.

Even the privet.

Even the English ivy.

Only the hollies stay firm, though the edges of many holly

leaves have been seared white by the chill.

Dead. Cold. Wilted.

But …

In the late afternoon,

we are walking a narrow, winding trail,

working our way back out of the woods,

and rounding a bend we are stopped by the sight:

a shaded tree trunk,

and growing up its side is a vine lit by the late

afternoon sun, it and the thin thread is fired,

glows

like a seam of white light against the black, shadowed bark.

Words by Stephen Black
Photos by Jenn Allmon