Karen Neuberg

The Forest

If I pretended for so long to be writing poems, it was only so I could speak of the forest
--Eleni Vakalo, The Forest

The forest speaks for itself in depth where sunlight beams to part the leaves, where a person can hear their own breath, feel the delirious pleasure of coolness and quiet that touches skin. The sense of “away from it all”. Delicious air.
 
How can I hear the forest for the noise I bring with me—news of war and shootings and crying and slaughter, or the shattering of lives, or the false equivalent of facts cluttering thinking, or of my own endless, circular chatter.
 
Noise. Noise. Once must go deep into the forest where time suspends. Where new sounds reach into the ears. At first, a hush that seems to expand the air. Within the hush, one finds a different sense of what silence contains. Stirring of leaves. Flapping of wings. Buzz of small insects. Scraping, rubbing, scratching, gnawing of small creatures. Snap of twig. Crackle and patter underfoot when walking.
 
Here I can return to “once upon a time”, and before. Before human contagion of natural spaces. I travel back into earlier ages. Rub my hands on bark and hear its roughness as I listen with my palms to decipher the pattern. I touch the softness of leaf on low branch with my fingertips or let it touch me as I pass in walking slowly.
 
And if the forest is pine …
And if the forest is deciduous …
And if the forest is mangrove, evergreen, redwood …
 
And if the forest begins at a road and if a farm is on the other side of the road, or a tract of houses, and a city rising in the not-too-far distance (over a river and past a stream) beyond fences and further along a highway then I am in an ecotone, a transitioning space between two adjacent ecological communities. Where in the forest does the forest become only its own community?  Where does it become ‘forest’ and not just woodlands?
 
Though I am an interloper in this community of forest, I am welcomed. The forest offers its signs for me to understand. It continues to communicate in myriad exchanges with other trees and plants in ways I know from science exist but I cannot hear. In all ways, the forest is telling me, telling us, that it is here, doing its job, cleaning the air, absorbing and exchanging carbon for oxygen.
 
I sing the forest. I accept its solace. I bathe in the air and light. I stand tall, and let myself take root into the floor of the forest.

Karen Neuberg is a Brooklyn-based poet. Her full length collection, Pursuit, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. Her latest chapbook is the elephants are asking (Glass Lyre Press, 2018). She is associate editor of the online poetry journal, First Literary Review-East. Her poems and collages can be found in numerous publications including 805, Canary, and Verse Daily.

*Vakalo, Eleni, Before Lyricism, tr. Karen Emmerich, 1st Edition, Ugly Duckling Press (Lost Literature) and Archipelago Books, 2017, 144 pages.