eight

New poem, written on a freezing night wandering through the Deschutes National Forest. After a long week in Sunriver with Ansley, Kate, and Ryan. As always on here, it's just a first draft. If you remember the language of the deer transit poem I posted a while ago, I also tried that with this piece. But... I don't really like it that way. Or rather, I do, but it cripples the two most important parts, so I went with this more straightforward, personal version.

Asgard is where the Norse gods lived. Olympus, where the Greek gods lived. Eden is where the tree of knowledge was. That's all you need to know, I guess.

Asgard, Olympus, Eden
Deschutes Forest, Winter 2009

Across a river bridge and off a beaten path, the snow grew whiter, the trees darker.

I stepped from the dully gleaming gunmetal of dense wood onto a moonlight-and-snow white clearing. It was long, and near the center it narrowed; there rose a single, perfect tree. Under the tree's long branches, tall grass, the color of ice and dust, was bent down and frozen. I could not bring myself to touch the tree, could not press my hand against its gnarled trunk, nor brush its needles overhead. By some indiscernible fear of some sudden rush of bright and frozen liquid knowing, I was repelled. I rested nonetheless beneath this perfect tree and watched pinpricks of stars appear through its blackly green branches.

Beyond, the clearing widened, and was longer, covered with a finer layer of ice and snow. I walked to the far end, crossed it again, and again, and again. My steps left deep holes of soft powder snow, ice cracked and broken at the top. Like tiny shards of glass or metal, ice broke and skated against itself; the sound of distant shattering grew constant, loud, and was broken only by the calls of lonely owls or angry geese

The field of snow abruptly curled and dropped at base of the thick-black forest's wall of gnashing teeth beneath the silver-blue wash of the full moon's star-dark sky, and I felt rush through my skin and through my bones what the old gods must have felt: a cold windswept and glacial awareness of the finity and smallness of Creation.

I followed my broken footprints back to the tree at the clearing's narrow waist. On my way, I ignored the lighter, snowed-in steps of someone come before me. I lay again under the terrific tree and held my hand out to touch its rough and green-black trunk, but I could not reach. My arm outstretched ungloved paper white and darkling-baby blue in the shadows of the tree's still branches, I lay with my eyes toward stars and pulled cold air into my empty lungs.

I left the tree untouched; it remains a memory of fear and loss. I am glad I could not press my flesh to that weathered bark, could only hold my bare hand toward its silvered brown trunk, could leave all that the perfect tree knows unknown in the cold and light.