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