(which must be a clearing deeper in the forest)
there to make friends with the aviators, and beg them to take me in.
Such a life it would be to fly in the air above the forest!
Distinctly I feel above the forest, luckily it is always gloriously morning.
And in a plane, one can easily find one’s way,
though not, of course, back to the world. One could,
I mean, find one’s way deeper into the forest.
SIX
What can I tell you about the forest
that you can’t read in books? Well,
our lives here are bared like the trunks of trees.
We believe fundamentally in things that are
quite obviously not true. On such things
our happiness is often based.
For instance, the allegiance of friends.
We of the forest are known cowards.
We make free with each other’s possession,
make love to each other’s husbands and wives.
At first it is odd, I know.
Pierre for instance, has a gorgeous wife.
She wears a little dress of leaves. People are forever
pulling at it as she curtsies by on her girlish legs.
One day she asked me if I would like
to go and find the Monumental Rose.
Where is it? I asked.
Deeper in, she said. We really must be going.
And so we went. I took Pierre’s name.
He took mine. We shook hands.
Have a fine time, he said. Be good.
The forest is much larger than you think.
THEN — a rustling of leaves. Cora had gone.
I’d better go, I said, following into the rustling
through the glorious light.
SEVEN
The philosophers who end up in the forest
stop writing books and begin instead
trying to grow herb-gardens. Every time
it happens the same way. It’s so funny.
There’s Spinoza. What’s he doing? Pruning oregano.
There’s William James.
What are you doing, William James? I inquire.
But he doesn’t answer, so absorbed is he
in laying string for vines. I watch for a minute,
standing fast by his elbow, intent on his progress.
Before you go, he says absently,
be sure to take a sprig of parsley for your buttonhole.
This I do. Need I say it twice?
We of the forest are terribly dashing.
EIGHT
Everyone in the forest has the same dream every night.
We sleep and are immediately awake again
in a tiny one-room house. There is a storm
in the out-of-doors. It is clear to everyone
that it is the biggest storm there’s ever been.
The forest, in fact, has been flattened.
All of a sudden, the storm halts.
We rush out of the cottage door
and are standing in the middle of a clearing
that stretches infinitely in every direction.
It’s then we realize that the forest
has not been flattened. Nor was there
a storm. Merely that
this is a deeper clearing, one we may
someday find. We wake then, invigorated,
and without so much as a by-your-leave,
rush off into the dew-strewn underbrush.
NINE
East Riding. It is the name that the world has
for the forest. I recall I was a child when I
heard it first. Still, I felt drawn.
I would go sometimes to the highest part
of the farm country and gaze eastward to the sea
of treetops drowsing in the distance,
hazy day, the sun’s rays mingling with the dust
and hanging in the air like the passing of hands.
I believe, I told the village priest, in East Riding.
Dismayed, he spoke with my parents,
counseling them to send me to the part of the world
farthest from East Riding.
But my father laughed. I recall this vividly.
He laughed at the priest, and raised me up
eye level into the air. He said,
“I believe you are going to East Riding.
Already you’ve left us.”
He took my mother’s hand and stood in the doorway
looking off into the distance as though watching
the progress of some traveler on a distant road.
But I was still in the house. My things weren’t even packed.
The priest stuck his sharp elbow in my ribs.
See? he said. So I slipped between my parent’s legs
and walked and walked and walked.
When I reached the distant road, I could see
that they were watching. I waved. They waved back.
And I followed the road where it went
beneath a canopy of trees.
TEN
On the deeper paths, one can’t know
for sure if one is welcome, save by clearings.
If one encounters lovely clearings
and crisp glorious mornings, then one has
cannily chosen the right path.
At other times it’s as dark as the inside
of a leaded window on an old cloudy block.
No one visits anymore, and the oldest man
is older by far than the histories he tells.
This is his defense, and it’s a keen one.
So I know to turn back, sometimes.
Always, it’s then one is given a small but kind