Annie Woodford
—
Forest Primer
Debris. Detritus. Leaves releasing tannin, heat, decay.
A centipede flows over, under, over, under the rain-
darkened intricacy of the forest floor, yellow stripe
& moving legs mimicking stippled, scattered sunlight.
A deer wheels away from me, cantaloupe & brown,
dapple-traces fading, softened by the end of summer,
briar-snagged & barb wire scarred. Tick spotted. Thin
& resilient, haunches muscle-stripped, huffing at me then,
from a distance, breathing in all scent and information
(It wanted you to move, my father said later.)
I was reading Turgenev in the woods—
Sketches from a Hunter’s Album—the short night
in the country. The heat. The open air, the river, the cover.
The springhead. Waiting in starlight or dawn-light. Ashes
blown off potatoes taken from the coals. There is the narrator
but also the two levels of peasant narrative—
one for the aristocrats & one between each other,
which they keep hidden from everyone except each other
—Grief & desire. Poverty & poetry. Poultry. Feathers
stuck to warm brown eggs. How much a rood of timber
is really worth. Where the deer bed down.
Broken Poem
The forest is never
quiet. In the ruin
of the country,
new leaves
shiver & unshiver,
in a clear-cut not yet
twenty years old, stumps
encase new trunks.
One gets a sense of the earth spinning,
the cold on the other side
of an atmosphere tensile
& delicate, its radiance
warped & billowed
by solar winds.
Shadows
pass over
the opposite ridge,
gradations of green no lens
could discern. The eye
is a finer mechanism
than science.
The song
of the spring peepers
ascends.
An old dogwood gums
the barbed wire that tried
to bridle it. Medicine,
medicine,
medicine
the plain wren sings.
Or maybe another word
or no word.
Or maybe a carol of ashes.
Dryland Fish
This is an elegy for the memory of skin—
his wide, freckled back, the way he cut a grapefruit
for me so the fruit slipped from the pith.
Once, we went to the forest. Morels pushed up
where long gray poplars marked the richest duff,
(first skim of green on mountainsides in spring),
the thrice-logged wildness nevertheless changing
the charge in the air—rhizome, ozone, water
rising through the trees’ tight grain. We lay down.
Annie Woodford is the author of Bootleg (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2019) and Where You Come from Is Gone (Mercer UP, 2022), recipient of the 2022 Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. Her micro-chapbook, When God Was a Child, was published by Bull City Press in 2023. She has been the recipient of the Jean Ritchie Fellowship. Her third poetry collection will be published in 2025 by Pulley Press.
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