The Forest


    During the day I have watched them stand around and chew the yellow grass,
    the longsuffering cows. Sometimes steam comes from their nostrils.
    I have also visited them at night, seen an entire herd standing
    in the rain, as unreacting as the trees behind them
    when the jitter of flashlight warned of my approach.

    Those were the cows in the field by the forest, and those
    were the days when going outside felt like going inside.
    There was the sound of a woodpecker pecking, and that was a kind of
    knocking. And the sound of the pine trees creaking, and that was
    a kind of door. And so you could enter the forest,
    and although each moment you trespassed further
    became more tense, it only lasted until you could no longer see the road.

    Then you would be inside, on a kind of unending
    staircase of roots worn silver like the soldered iron
    that holds stained glass together. From a distance, it would be
    mountains, but up close, under the arrows, spears, and ropes of trees,
    it was a forest floor, palatial leaf-meal mosaics on the ground.
    There was a little carpet of stream so clogged with leaves

    it had stopped being a stream. And such a surfeit of silence,
    it had become a kind of sound
    to which, for a while, you could pay attention. Though
    it's inaccurate, I want to say it was like staring at a light.
    All you could do was sense it; then you had to recover,
    by which I mean to wait for everything to grow dim again.
    Then the mind was the only flashlight,
    a little bobbing beam that would illuminate
    randomly and too little.


    Locked

    And yes it is necessary to admit
    walking in the forest
    the heart is a lock

    it has inviolable chambers
    like the woods fallen trees
    that block

    access to the river
    snowdrops surp