"Book of Absence" (Rebecca Hazelton)

"Book of Absence"

Rebecca Hazelton

Darlings, the forest is disappearing. Not the one you remember,

with the little girl and her basket and the wolf astride,

but the one that surrounded your small house as a child

and was smaller than you realized, the forest

you planned to run into and never out of if someone

didn’t understand you and soon. There are fewer trees,

if trees there ever were, and not the roots of some slumbering,

and the trees are cellphone towers, disguised

and blunting the beaks of woodpeckers, vibrating

other animals that would burrow with our conversations

in their small maws. Darlings,we have been talking overmuch

and the forest is disappearing. When I spoke to you in the middle of the night

I swore I was dreaming but the dream was that I was lying

next to you, and you weren't you, but an other. I said help

and you held me, but you were a thing I was shrinking from.

Our talks tunneled through a phone line like it was 1989

but now wing through the air and mingle with others

who are just as everyday and unspecial. The forest

once covered all of England but sailed away. The forest

had a peacock farm inside it with far-off calls but now

a pig farm a lake of pig shit now a green and dying bloom.

Darlings, while we have been talking at night 

when I thought you were someone else the forest 

has reassessed its options. While the little girl

weighed her basket for options the world worried at the forest's stitch

and the whole thing came undone. While you were dreaming

the forest a dream of the green bloom of the earth, I dreamed 

a conversation that I wanted to hear, to overhear 

how you've been dreaming me as a girl in the woods,

the forest coming down all around her, when 

the forest woke up and the cellphones all rang.

"Book of Absence" by Rebecca Hazelton appears in the current issue of Pleiades online.