In the silence of a forest, I try to picture every body that’s left its footfall on the spongy ground, whole histories of beings creating that moment.
That I like to fill in the gaps of everything I do not know is not a copout.
When I googled “trees AND microclimates AND Northern + Michigan,” the first thought I had was how many women published articles in The Journal of Wildlife Management in 1968 and then has a woman ever had an abortion in a conifer swamp deeryard and then what is a deeryard. Outside the pages of every history are the foot notes we cannot point to but can visualize if we listen closely:
In a picture I took of a boreal tree—
wide at its base, rooted deep along the shoreline of my favorite great lake (for its anger; for its insistence; for the rocks it makes to remind us that our time is a needle head along the continuum of this ever-unfolding universe or that now, this moment, this second that is unfolding as you read or re-read these words is the only one that matters); narrowing upward and outward, the scars invasive species make along the barren branches, windthrown protrusions still dangling, reaching towards the lake like the water can save it; a mellow sky: blues and whites and sunshine set against the chill of the coming winter you cannot feel but still foretell in the brittleness of the spindliest twigs. Large granite rocks peek out from the sand, inky protrusions framed within the triangle of a dangling water-bound branch, the floor of a beach, and the trunk of a tree softly leaning into sunshine
—are pages and pages of truths announced through redactions: black rectangles deliberately stretched over words or phrases or full sentences. A picture curated so you could not see the scars along the branches but imagine the ways the long horn beetles came there, to that inland sea, on a ship or a shoe, and left their mark, in such a way that you could not know but might guess.
Sometimes they are reckless in what they reveal: whole swaths of a lifetime spent wanting and getting, as if worlds and fears do not lay heavy in their throat, as if the coating of their unfolding is not sticky in their mouths, as if curation never occurred to them as a framing device for the tree pointing toward all the most obvious escape hatches.
Molli Spalter is a community college professor in the northern Detroit suburbs where she teaches English. Her work explores the ways and moods and things a body gathers. Molli’s poetry has been published in Rust & Moth, Rogue Agent Journal, and Black Warrior Review.