Driving the Forest at Night

In the darkness, the air begins to smell of drops of water on fallen needles, and rain pulled densely into moss, startled like glass. Can you hear it, there, the shifting of the old mountains underfoot, slumped by wind and the slow trickle of water, the clay skin, the granite stones, the piles of old sea-beds muddled high–gray, forgotten ancestry? And as the wind blows downward, the dark of their green becomes something that watches you, night guardians who, somehow, you have always known; and you yearn for nights at firesides you have never seen, waking up to the dew and a gray sky that you know will give way to a soft tapping rain, one that will sink into you the same as the perfumed soil, and leave the streaks unbrushed on your forehead, in your eyelashes, like cedar webs, the pulse of the old ways, the ancient heartbeat of the wind sweeping long from the ocean, and the trees calling you, song-circles, cinnamon edges, sinking soils that hold up the world.