print previewback ADAM CHILES
Spring Inventory in a Wood Near Lund
The paraffin of bluebells.
The wood, a silent
stove, lit from within.
My father’s wood.
His small registry
of delights. All afternoon
the ants spelling their figures
over the needled floor
like hieroglyphs
scattering.
And like my father, I’ve stood
ankle deep in the brackish
tank of these ferns.
Stretched out in the private
flatbed of my thinking
and studied the circuitry
of alder leaf, branch
its tidal
constellations.
Sensed in nearby ponds
pikes engage
the trembling arsenal
of their bodies
as I’ve felt my own skin
quicken to its
suffering,
an inland gull
merely
the pitched cries
of a child, sky
its darkening cradle.
Each spring
I’ve watched my father
walk deeper
into this wood,
deeper
into its untamed
mansion,
year after year, sleeved
in the clotted weather
of its rooms,
the air’s inscrutable
fractions.
Now this abacus
of stones
turning in my hand
is all I have,
this common
denominator
of trees.
Even so rooks
in the attics
go on delivering
the dark river
of their songs,
between then and now
all of it spooling
into the evening’s
syncopated cavities.
It is late. The wood
a drifting cluster
of inflections
trembling in our blood
as ants decipher
their paths
along the forest floor
lifting their luggage
once more into the cellars
this earth becomes,
the moon a shilling
burning
at the leaf’s green sill
each blade
our porous
oriel.
It is late. The air
another form
of currency.
The bluebells too, a fuel
we know ourselves by
as small as it is, and brief,
mite, wood tic, continuing
their odysseys
through the cemeteries
of branch rot, clay
the rich kiln,
its lit vocabulary.
Let us speak in this accent
of alder, gull, ant, soil.
Now that you are gone
father
these words
are all I have. 
The Afterlife
Fauré
Spring Inventory in a Wood Near Lund