Absconding into the Woods
(to receive 100 lashes and labour 6 months in irons)

Smells, like yeasted dough,
rise from the damp of the rain
forest. Its rich peat soil is layered
with wet leaves and crumbling logs.
Trees are scented – pine, lemon, sassafras.
Paperbarks shed their skins
and fungi gleam, orange and silver
against the browns and greens.
Light, fractured by a mesh of ferns,
falls like the sun's last rays
through the stained-glass windows
of a vaulted church.
Rot and regrowth, death and life,
cycle and recycle. I have but one stay
on this earth before my bones turn
to clay and my thoughts disperse
like mist, like leaves.


In the woods at night it's black
as pitch - blacker than the bowels
of a prison hulk, blacker than a man's
dark thoughts when past all hope
of love, black as the ache
of absence, blacker than falling
over the edge of the world.
And the rushing noise is a blackness
in your ears as rivers turn in their beds
grinding the stones in their path
like a man grinds his teeth in his sleep.
There's no sleep here. Wind is awake
in the leaves where huge-eyed creatures
shuffle through the forest litter that exhales
warmth at your feet. The stars are far
away. They cannot see or hear you
and they have no mercy.

[Note: this poem was previously published Island magazine, May 2002]