“Between one tree and another, there is all the thirst of the earth.”
-Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop
Tell me.
Have you ever seen woods so.
Deep so.
Every tree a word does your heart stop?
-Anne Carson, excerpt from “Town on the Way through God's Woods"
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I am in the forest. Nine thousand feet high, I'm a cloud, swathed in white; I see everything. A field of purple flowers blooms only at the apex, awaying before I utter, “Ahh.” The sun rises speckled through pines, nouns and verbs shake themselves out, rearrange: the doe's hooves, the hummingbird's sip, the black ant's crawl. Has the winding mountain pass altered them? Or the air around them changed?
No where else have I seen black mountain ants like Goliath; I imagine them gracing Dillard’s Tinker Creek, Thoreau’s Walden. They march as big as my thumb and would carry off my lunch, suitcase, cabin if allowed. Did they migrate from la selva Brazilera or the Uruguayan pampas? We sweep them off the porch and they fall back into nature's hem, unaware.
Mountains smell differently. Just as my own bed, cupboards, closets exude a musk that is me, the mountains – these Cedar ones anyway – bleed pine. Pine that registers in the nose before the brain; before the brain labels it pine it is not. It is emerald unfurling, closing over my mind's mouth. And I find, strangely, I don't seek air, only to be sucked green.
-T. @ The Chocolate Chip Waffle © 2011. All rights reserved.
Photo: Man Ray
