I walk in my winter wood at dusk
As the sun gathers up its last rays of the day
Leaving the warm air heavy with mist
Long tendrils curling up from the earth
And winding through the trees,
Climbing toward the newly darkened sky
Spreading through limbs and across paths
Dulling the moonlight to grey where it lands around me
Silver light glancing off wet, barren limbs
In my winter wood.
Stands of trees reaching up and out
Colliding their way up the ridges
And closing over my head as I climb with them,
Headed for the apex where I can look out
Over the valley below slowly filling
With the fog, white now from above
As the moonlight falls
Over my winter wood.
Ridges rising askew around me, great prehistoric behemoths
Flexing their wrinkled backs across my landscape
As they lie in silence under the winter sky.
Seas of white mist now froth about in the rising wind,
Lifting ever higher, drifting beyond the valley walls
To spill into the darkening night, chasing the moon
As her circuit ends and the night truly comes,
Darkness closing first along the path behind me,
Slowly shrouding the trees from the ground up.
Tendrils of mist twirling up and up in pursuit of the moon
As if to join the clouds to the forest,
The sky to the earth,
And captured between
I walk in my winter wood.
