January 31, 2010

Winter only seems static.

In winter the woods

is never the same

from week to week,

never dormant,

never waiting for the tilting earth

to reach its spring stillpoint.

The woods is never still,

patient and waiting for spring.

Last week the warm and wet weather

fired the green lichens

and the shoots erupting

from the ground,

and human voices rang

near the trailhead

and groups of people walked the trails.

Today the ice has silenced the woods,

only the sound of birds,

sparrows and cardinals and woodpeckers,

and the rare fellow walker,

a few with dogs,

mostly on the abandoned

road through the forest.

All around us,

coming from all directions,

is the sound of ice falling,

some pieces as much as an inch long,

falling from the limbs,

loosed by the sunlight’s warmth,

sounding like rain in the forest,

and when they fall on my shoulders

or my tobogganed head

they feel like just the slightest tap,

someone’s tapping fingertip

on my skin through my clothes.

The ground is covered

with fallen ice.

Ice sheathes

the thin branches

and the few evergreen

leaves.

Snow lies piled

on mushroom shelves.

Last week we found a tree trunk

that had been sawed off

about four feet from the ground.

What had caught our eyes then

and made us stop

was the strange cut pattern

the different saw angles

had grooved into the wood.

This week what made us stop

was the smiley face someone had drawn

into its overlay of snow and ice.

The shoots from the underground bulbs

that we had noticed last week

stand half buried

by the ice and snow this weekend.

Over a part of the path

we have walked many times before,

we notice,

for the first time today,

long thin dangling pods,

soft and mustard colored,

like pecan pollen clusters.

A thin icicle drips in the sun,

connected to a limb by two ice horns.

The weather is just warm enough

and thawed streams flow between icy banks.

And in the ice and quiet,

we notice

the shell of a long dead trunk,

its heartwood long ago rotted away,

its craggy bark crumbling

and twisting into the cold air.

We walk for a long time,

almost two hours,

following a path

we’d never walked before,

grateful there are still mysteries

to be discovered

in these woods.

Words by Stephen Black

Photos by Jenn Allmon