“Forests are where you hear the trees—
a foreign film murmuring.
Undercover life forces tunnel, restructure
the strata of decay, fumbling the wet & bronze & rosewood needles,
nudging & moving down & into
hidden homes.
Some dusks you think you see stained-glass windows
& brackish, inland pools fill the eyes.
Part of the winter forest’s strategy is transparency,
but that makes it feel known.
So the subnivean zone forms—
under-snow rooms, or unconscious zones
in which you feel no hunger
& curl deaf & blind
in apparently meaningless passages.”
— Miranda Field, “Oneiric Theory”
His fears will travel with him, clinging to him with an endless love."
— Sharmistha Mohanty, from “Yellow Light”
— Thomas Bernhard, from The Loser tr. Jack Dawson
The forest is thick, but it’s light,
Like a temple, like Athens city.
In the forest every daybreak seems
An outbreak of harmless fire.
When the sun rises, its descent is silent-
Here rarely anyone comes to visit.
It is dozing fitfully, or mist has descended.
There is no pillow
On its bed. The empty paths
Are eternally circular. Deep breathing,
Rational breathing - carefree breathing here.
— Rati Amaghlobeli, from “The Forest” tr. Donald Rayfield
That first night on the Plain, I discovered distance. Supine in the dark, I watched the steep night endlessly receding, its black depths mapped by stars. I remembered how, alone in the narrow forest clearing… I walked as if bearing on my back the weight of the forest. I yearned to walk in a straight line. Such a simple desire—so simple it could hardly be said to be a desire. But that is what I longed to do. Distance was coiled up inside me—in the bones and sinews of my legs—the way movement is in a caged animal, as flight in the limed bird. I was pilloried, shackled to the trees, which rose up all around us—mute and merciless judges…
The stars seemed to wheel round the black sky; I saw their fiery tracks instead of the unmoving points of light that had hung above the trees. Watching them in their headlong, I was sick again in the grass and had to shut my eyes. I felt vulnerable—uncovered—exposed to that dangerous light, as if caught in a meteor shower."
— Norman Lock, from “Ideas of Space”
“Oh turn your back, you say
Oh turn your back
VI
Letters in the trees cull
wild irises and pickle weeds.
I am reading against the bark…
VIII
Forty-paces.
Slowness pulls
at my upturned throat,
the ground shifting urgently
toward the gulls.
I am much too far away from the clearing,
much too far from this place of east winds.
IX
In the clearing,
deer move from the thistle,
curiously pressing their noses
against your boots.”
-Jane Wong, from “Duel”
of maple leaves in a breeze,
the ground a soft bedding
where wild ginger mingles
with cleavers and mayapple
in patches so dense it seems
the cyclopic blossoms need
no light but that which oozes
from leaf-rot & old nut husks,
their hulls upturned as though
dragged from moorings by
the spring tide; to lay, watching
the shadows flicker & sway
letting the oaks’ hair fall, strand
be pollenacious strand, fall,
little ticklers, on the tough meat
of our necks; warmer air spilling
from the sun-anointed fields,
is to feel our stems burn
to a vain, lusty pink, selfless
with desire somehow, bark
beginning to peel, long,
sclerotic mats. Spores collect
in our nooks & cavities, sap
like a bleeding outward
beneath archipelagos
of mold, coal black & crusty.
What are our bodies now
if not a spangling of veins
deaf to all vision save
the worship of flesh by tongue,
eyes, even closed, puddles
where frogs are swimming
and singing & staying alive?"
— Thorpe Moeckel, “Beginning to Peel”
