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