About Deep Woods

Ragged billows of spruce and beech
catch the wind,
swell and shudder,
against the high sky
from which blue through quivering needles
falls to sepia.

In these woods there are no mirrors,
no human face or gesture,
an utter absence of machine,
silence you have longed for, without knowing it,
silence you did not imagine.

In these woods silence moves away
from where you stand, darkly through its layers;
it lifts the brown light in which birds
call and reply, secret flutes and oboes
in the resounding lofts.

There are illusions of hallways
leafed and easily lost.
There are signs of a sort:
a bleached and broken urchin,
a ghost ring where birches lived,
saplings narrowed to bare poles
that climb straight up the dark air.

The great gray granite lies obdurate
under velvet mosses;
brown leaves quilt its hollows.

A twig stirs. Your eyes open
to the gleam of a dappled wood frog
materializing in the fringe of fern,
one black eye in profile,
stopped in mid-motion.

Here is respite
from being seen or known;
nothing is about you,
and like the frog,
attentive, quiet,
wanting nothing,
you begin to disappear.