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

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