The wood is on fire tonight. Changeable light, the sun sinking, the sky shrinking into red and flaring up. Light, coming from the ground fills up the forest all with flame.

The wood tonight smells like a rotting apple, Dionysian feast for rabbits. Watch them run through their wanders, drunk, besotted on this goblin yellow yield. Fox, in this forest, himself a flame.

Who knew how this secret place would give one final graceful orgy out? Who could anticipate this mad enraptured succulence?

Over the bridge it seems the gully is not what it was. Live leaves run it down. They own it. They run in it a current of all currents, and not.

Woman’s face, a beaming brown sun. Her self one with the forest and the mood of this place, me, one, each of us greeting the other as she who has seen and taken part in revelry, this Dionysian moment, this hinge, as we fall from and into.

Once again, this woodpecker upon a tree holds his own reign, holds forth his rhythm. He fears not the fire running up the very limbs of trees, for his limbs are not tied to earth as rabbits are tied to earth. Let him be drunk on sap. If he falls he fears not. Flight carries him up, up, red jaunty cap its own rising lick of flame.

And if we built a shelter here, my love, what doves we could become! Thee and me curled small in the cave of fallen trees. What elegance need we, when this pyramid of our making will hold against any winter’s fall? Bring thee thy skin to my chin. We will curl small, smaller. Smallest of all, make me into a seed. Bury me under these trees, this mound, this architectonic ground. Let me sleep, shiver, as the last flames of autumn run high, higher. I sink.

And there she is, my other part, my counterpart, the flip to my friend. Her smile is galactic, wide as the wood is wide. Her eyes shine.

And there is the joy of the woman in the wood. And there is the joy of the wood in the woman.