February 13, 2010

Why I Go to the Woods on this February Day

I go into the woods for the wild
and to glimpse the sediment of wild things
I go to dream of forests ranging endlessly,
sprawling, unbounded by streets and lots
and shopping malls, huddled on river bluffs,
east and west,
fierce and vast,
Faulkner’s bear
and mountain lions
and shumard oaks and ashes,
to know what we have destroyed and are
destroying,
to honor what remains.



I go into the woods this day in February,
one day before Valentine’s Day,
to see this ruby-crowned kinglet,
shy and evasive, fluttering into flight
with each step I take closer,
I go to see him winter in these woods,
to watch him waiting until the world tilts
back into place, waiting for the signal fires
of the sunwarmed air to send him northward again.
I go to be reminded of this ceaseless rhythm
of rest and flight that grips us all,
this rhythm guided by the felt
but unfelt motions of this
endlessly restless world.



I go to see these shelf lichens,
algaed green, to see moss
and mushrooms brown and orange and white
settled on fallen trees and dead trees and snags,
to see these corduroy striped tulip poplars
and the diamond ridged ash trees.
I go to see things that have no need of me,
things as indifferent to my joy as they are
to the snow piles slowly melting on fallen logs,
to the threads of meltwater streaming along their bark,
streaming to drip down and burrow deep into the forest floor.
I go to see things that view us all as transient,
as fleeting as this snow, though our love and wisdom grow solid,
steadily narrow to a focus round as the heart
of winged maple seeds waiting to be launched by the wind.



I go see the looping and swagging wild grape vines
and the hairy poison ivy vines,
to see them motionless but always climbing, seeking light.
I go to see trees harshly bent and strangely angled
by the harsh facts of sun and wind.
I go to see the leafless greenbriar thickets,
to see their coiled tendrils browned
by winter’s cold and dark.
I go to be reminded of the hard edges of possibility,
to be reminded of how our lives,
like the lives of all things,
are bound and freed by the harsh facts
of time and sun and wind.



I go to woods on this day in winter
to see the world as it really was and is,
brown and rusty orange and green,
to read the hidden life of the world
etched into the rotting bark of fallen oaks resolving
themselves slowly back to earth.

I go to remind myself that this patient, inexorable
work of rot and resurrection
is the only real work we have.




Words by Stephen Black
Photos by Jenn Allmon