The fear of meeting someone else in the woods:
Your father. Not a bear, not a camera in a tree.
Living with him is like the fear of turning around
after hearing leaves and seeing no one.
You look around. You go behind trees, empty of all their colour.
You check under rocks (don't waste your time) and see nothing but
your black shape on the bottom of a copper lake.
If I met my father in the woods
I'd want to know how we both ended up here
on the outside womb, with sunlight
seeping, stretching through the wooden hatches
and tunnelling around like a dizzy Tinkerbell.
I'd ask if you built the fire pit with a ring of rocks,
borrowed from the ancient walls.
Bottle caps litter the circle, why didn't they burn?
I'd ask if you hear the paper bones
reaching East over the water, louder than the cars miles away?
Do you hide in the cave, so dark inside that on the brightest day you feel cold?
If we met here, I'd show you the fallen trees
broken down from the blizzard
resting until someone takes them somewhere warm.
The fear of meeting someone else in the woods:
It's the fear of seeing yourself in a place no one ever goes.
We cannot be afraid of the woods.
Our backs may be turned on this sunny rock, ears settling on a language
we mangled to form our own.
Our backs may be turned to the ground,
eyes scanning the black buds against a blue backdrop.
The buds look down at the shadows they cast
over its dead skin.
Some golden survivors shake their slumbering souls
rustle rustle :
they are an alto voice to the waves lapping the sand
"Hope Meadow", it calls.
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