The woods are dark. The are so very dark and full of sounds. I can’t name all the sounds. I know cicadas, crickets, and tree frogs. After that I cannot say. Recent rains have made these woods fragrant. Grasses release a green sweetness. Fallen logs and rotting leaves offer their pungent fecundity. The darkness and its sounds and scents call to me, speaking warning but also enticement. I want to be immersed in it. Maybe the unknown sounds would tell me their names, reveal their intentions.
The courage I feel against this darkness, I know it exists only because of the streetlights behind me, lining the walking trail. A pair of joggers crunch by on the crushed granite and I begin walking again, in the light, alongside the dark woods that I do not enter.
The nights on the farm were very much darker. There were woods, but not near the house. I could stand outside, unable to see very far except up into the infinity past the moon, through the billion, trillion, zillion stars. In the distance, nearer the woods, coyotes yipped and howled. I could stand there, enthralled and unafraid, with a yard fence around me, a dog beside me, an open door behind me.
On the park trail after dark, I study the lace silhouettes of trees against the light-polluted sky. I wonder if the other walkers or the joggers take notice of the beauty. I know there is wildlife in these woods. I’ve seen rabbits, squirrels, armadillos, hawks, owls. I’ve heard of coyotes, but I’ve never heard them, much less seen them. Same goes for more human intrigues.
But then, I don’t venture into the darkness of the woods. I romanticize them and trust nothing will rush out of them, at me or my co-walkers. I walk, reveling in this sundown beauty. Look up. A planet, a plane, the moon in its phase. I’m caught in the shelter of the star-erased sky.
Neil Ellis Orts is a writer currently living in Houston, Texas. His work has appeared in a number of small press journals and anthologies, most recently Ruminate (journal) and Unknotting the Line (Dos Gatos Press). His novella, Cary and John, is available from Wipf & Stock Publishers.
Beautiful!