When they couldn’t tell where you were going, those woods were dark.
The moonlight didn’t make it to your neck, the winds
****** the wet from your eyes and carried it until it was stale.

There were no creatures in those woods, only the incomprehensible whispers
Of men who had been lost there before:
Men with wives and ancestors younger than they.

Those woods were safe, but they had too many questions to answer,
Too many questions to remember or know at all.

Your feet reached a tree trunk that didn’t fall there on its own,
Knees clenched, your stomach caved into your spine.
The moonlight reached your neck just long enough to whisper
The last sentence those woods would remember:

“Go, you aren’t needed here anymore.”

You never realized that moonlight has a taste,
Or that you can spin from it an invisibly thin thread,
That is used to weave paper for the Titans.

Stars hang from around your neck like marbles,
Like so many trophies and answers to the questions you never knew to ask.
The Inky Black rests on your shoulders breathing the deep sighs of the giants
And the Oldest Ones, the ones before us and them.

The skies have left room for you now.

Every seldom moment your daughter reminds you of something you once knew
But forgot to remember, not for lack of trying.
Her questions about the questions, and a memory of a tree trunk.

In the distance, a softly whispered murmur escapes from the confusion,
And the lights around you sputter.
But there will never be, nor has there ever been
A star that remembers when those woods were dark.

A spiral of light, like music to my eyes
I spun out into the golden grass
The stars shining brightly above me
Only seconds ago the vortex that seemed to knock me down
I heard a laugh, but no one was there
Maybe it was the stars
The moon was too kind to laugh
My silver feet began to work again
Daring the stars to tip me twice
The dampened earth beneath my twirling soles
A cushion when the dare was done
I laid there then, but
Only long enough to find Pegasus
Until I heard the muffled steps and swishing grass
As others wandered from the trees
Their candles sad mirrors
Of the vortex in the sky
One by one they challenged the stars
That tucked them all in to a bed of laughter and golden grass
I watched as they disappeared beneath the waving fronds
Until I could feel the hands of the stars readying the finale
Pulling me into a spiral of sweat and lazy zephyrs
They too knew that this was the last dance
But still I whispered up to their shining choir
Daring them to stop time.
Their hands were on their pocket watches
Pulling out the gears
A wish so close to granting you could hear the crickets pause
Yet soon they stirred
The spiral pushed, but laughter pushed it back
No longer harmonizing to their melodic lights
I fell again
This time over a root
My silver feet tarnished to grey
And lost their shine walking back through the woods

A pine forest is the hand,
The soul of the palm fans out in fingers
Like the clayey striations of the sun.
The forest has no sound but the bonebreast
Wandering round of a similar hand,
All but shut now except for the unspoiled nest
Of browning needles and the ancient realmless mound of love.

It’s an absence
Of our entire essence;

Lost I have been among these woods;
My bare feet drum a path of your presence;

Leaves sitting among the branches
Their colorful array of moods.

Murmur a wind from a depth
I’ve once glimpsed behind these trees

For a buried world’s shoulders
Awaken an embrace for my soul;

It’s always been here, hasn’t it?
Always sneeking behind,
Waiting for the day,
I dare.. to turn around.

For in the end, there’s rebirth.

let’s run for the woods—
write each other
love letters on the fallen bark,

take a dip in the lake,
walls of pine trees around us,
fish nipping at our toes.

we’ll nap in a field of moss—
ferns tickling our legs and
kissing under the canopy...

and someday we’ll go home
to the warm cave with a fire
and watch the sparks float like fireflies,

someday.

For a year or possibly more,
Decompression begins:
Purging electricity, electronics.
Fall away, Internet, Oh!
No more cellular,
**** the television set,
Except, perhaps, a radio,
Lest I totally forget....

Hello, paper,
Hello, books,
Come off the shelves;
Lose those ***** looks,
Warm again before my eyes,
Feel the press of my writing stick.

Thoreau, the fakir,
Left the social order
Just a year,
Though just how far
He really went
Remains foggily unclear,
And the fact that he returned
Suggests that Nature
Left him feeling burned.

So, like a diver,
Rising from the deep,
I'd take a while to meditate,
To let the busyness-es go
And put electric dreams to sleep.

Sometimes I want the snow
To fall over me,
Cover me
Somewhere in the woods.
I’d just lie on some fallen twigs;
Listen to them crackle
As I pushed my back into the earth.
Then I’d look up
And watch the white drop,
Let the snow fill up over my body.

I’d feel it sink into me,
Pour into an empty mold.
Cover me
And make me part of the smoothness
Of the white earth.
Then I’d wait,
For the rabbit or deer to leave its tracks
Over my white.

And I wouldn’t care.
Not care that the snow had been
Wrinkled~
Because I’d wrinkle it too
When I got up and left my tracks
On another’s white—
Maybe someone like me,
Who had watched the snow fall.
And maybe they’d stay longer.
But I’d have to go,
Because it’s only
Sometimes I want the snow
To fall over me.

You'll find sparrows, my mother said
Not in the thick,
nor the deep dark
canopies of the woods

You will find them, in droves,
at the ends of tree lines,
busy, busy—always busy
whether in song or with a twig

You will find them in coves
perched upon the green vines,
busy, busy—always busy
calling out upon a sprig

They are small when alone
like me,
in the long, silent hours of my nights
But in the morning they are a chorus
reminding you of all the work yet begun

So, go, find yourself a tree
You'll find sparrows when you're done