in the forest

by Michael Pedersen

& there’s spare breath everywhere 
gentling the lungs, ‘specially in the sun
-sloshed moss. Grass spears,
a ferny curtain, juicy layers 
in a glacier of green. We keep Buddha 
schtum about such sorcery. 

Our galumphing bodies gambol 
into the clearing & shake the place 
awake. A sparrow-hawk, wrapped 
in tree’s beardage, makes a French 
Exit. Is a snowdrop in moonlight 
a tadpole’s version of a star? Happy

frogface. We sit on a fallen log
chipper as a box of matches. Chancing 
our gunpower caps, the prospect of flame 
in every sun-splintering false call. You
tell me: the best thing about a forest 
is getting lost in it.

Leafy parasols umbrella out, 
their flush filigrees scribbling the soil 
with shadow-ink. There’s the birds 
again, singing as if we’re holding back 
their bread. Whereas you
meditate with the eye’s shutters 

drawn, I’m flouncing in foliage, 
scooping up snail-shells—yellowed
ochre with lilac trims. A cache 
of forty stacked into a cairn. 
Beautiful really, if not for their death- 
empty blackhole bellies. 

In our wake, a mound of shells, 
enough to take a stranger 
by the throat, to have them twitchy 
with questions of how? & why? Perhaps 
a coven of witches firing-up
the cauldron, or a bear

with a taste for slime—a clump 
of cow parsley to clean the gloop 
off its teeth? Confronted 
by the gothic thrill of this verdant 
world, the sky lets out a whooooosh. 
& so we get to snogging—
face-licking like sated lions
after a bloody kill. Aw the years & worry 
& risk it took, yet here we still are:
pockets full of elderflowers
so there’s tea from the spoils.