Old Growth
April 8 2009


A voice
in the wilderness.
A tree about to fall.

The river is loud
on this knuckle of land
standing hand-in-glove in its curve
— rushing down,
pounding polished rock.
Where you must shout to be heard.
So it’s surprising, the sudden quiet
as you retreat into the trees,
emerging from mist.

Just leaves, rustling.
The crack of a branch
when the wind picks up.

Here, in the shelter
of densely treed forest
still cool from the night before,
you wonder if you’re truly alone.
You imagine eyes, watching,
ears, cocked.
And you feel like an intruder,
in this wild primeval wood.

So when you hear that disembodied voice
— tearing at tranquil air
absorbed by timeless forest —
you feel exhilarated, free.
And screaming at the top of your lungs
you don’t give a damn, for once
that no one in the world is listening.

All those futile words
they didn’t care to hear,
compressed
into one anguished deafening noise.


This poem started with the first line: "A voice in the wilderness." I like doing this: seeing a cliche through unjaded eyes; exploring its literal and metaphorical possibilities. I think the saying is usually meant to imply something about the prophet scorned, the prescient soothsayer who is ignored in his own time. But I chose to follow it in a more literal direction; into a reverie about actual wilderness, where I often feel most at home: the quality of sound, the misdirection. And where it eventually led me was to a great exhilarating act of ventilation: ventilation at the futility of one voice trying to be heard in the deafening cacophony of the world. And more particularly, the frustration of writing all this poetry, only to have it drop into a black hole of utter indifference -- like the proverbial tree; falling, unheard, in the forest. (And to anyone who actually reads this, my respectful apologies for such self-indulgent whinging!)