By the pond:
Rocks lining/enclosing the water are roughly palm-shaped and angular, sitting at awkward angles, skewed helplessly like a school of fish caught in an industrial net.
The afternoon sun makes the water look smooth and solid like a silk sheet and it ripples towards the edges making the algal islands bounce, but I know the ripples are only because of the synthetic fountains every third or so down the middle of the reservoir.
The geese dip into the water as I approach and I feel guilty for trespassing and disrupting them. They pivot cumbersomely like swan boats on the river.
A powdery white butterfly the size of my nose weaves left to right before my chest as I walk home, and I can’t tell if it’s celebrating my return or frantically warning me of something ahead.
Two birds chase each other back and forth across the water like black jets with white stripes painted on their tails.
In the woods:
Fallen tree sides covered with shell-like shelves of fungus, attached by lumpy styrofoam glue. The centers are dusty white but the edges, curving slightly downward, are lined with brown recalling their mushroom cousins. Beneath their umbrellas hide tawny tarantula hairs.
The tree bark is covered in round pockmarks shaped like eyes or lips. If you look closely, there is a deep redness beneath the thin cotton-candy layer of foamy green.
I first notice the birds chirping but then note their calls are alternating with the yelping of the construction vehicle by the creek; I wonder if they would call so urgently were they not competing with the omnipresent thundering from the road or the humming that seems to radiate from the sky. I am shocked to realize that I hadn’t noticed the noise until now; upon consideration, the ominous rumbling makes me uneasy; it tells of a deep-seated, all-mighty power and I can’t tell if it’s the predatory growl of industrialization or the core of the Earth itself grumbling with contempt.
For every half-dozen oaks, there is a birch with dolphin skin, almost slimy-looking from afar but chalky to the touch just like the painted walls of my house. I open my eyes and find the source of the texture: there are little bends like ripples in a running river and more eye spots like the trees before. Just above my forehead there is a cluster of three knots each the size of my thumb, radiating with little folds like book pages halved and fanned out; together they are tiny spinning galaxies. While the tree is greyish white up to my head, when I stand back I see the green stains of weathering telling of age.
The spaces between the trees are filled with twigs— some up to my knee, others twice my height— posing as trees themselves. The tallest are crowned with a 3-foot radius of nascent branches dusted with light green buds. Just one, mildly-sized, still wears a coat of clementine leaves so that it seems aflame against the brown and green environs. Its branches congregate in five distinct levels, the second from the top bare on one side. Every ten feet or so are the even greater imposters— steel spigots roughly the height and width of the wannabe-trees but capped with a telling cobalt blue nozzle.
It is 3:30 in the afternoon, and so I know without looking that the sun is almost 45 degrees against the horizon to the West; to my East, the elongated shadows projected on the leaves confirm this. My shadow and that of the tree behind me are one and the same, just different shapes. The sun doesn’t care what you’re made of or if you move or talk or invent things or not— the sun’s breath paints everything the same grey image.
Looking back towards the pond, the water is an aqua ribbon weaving through the trees, and above that the cars on the highway cut through the trunks but exit unscathed with the skill of birds.
Leaves underfoot rustle nervously, never quite even with the beat of my gait.
Exiting the woods:
I spot something blue and glaring in the grass before the fence; knowing it is someone’s trash I am afraid to approach it as if that would accuse me of the shameful transgression.
The fence parting the reservoir from the woods is patched up at odd intervals, the unstained wood shouting Ts and Is and Es and Ls and Hs and Fs. At the edge of the forest lay two spare planks, already half-rotted to a dull blue, swallowed into the equilibrium of life and decay.
