I live in the woods, but most days never touch their bark.
Work hums in my ears long after the laptop closes.
My body, once easy in its stride, negotiates each climb and bend now,
as if the forest were a country whose border
I keep promising to cross soon.
In the mornings, mist leans against the cabin walls, waiting.
I watch it loosen from the treetops while the coffee brews.
The scent of sun-warmed pine slips through the open door.
Somewhere under the canopy, a branch cracks, slow and deliberate.
I used to know the cool of damp moss, the warmth of river stones in late July.
I used to know the river’s voice.
Intimacy is not gone, only thinner.
It arrives in fragments,
the quicksilver flash of a hummingbird’s throat at the feeder,
the scamper and scratch of squirrels in the trees,
the soft crumble of pine needles underfoot,
the white-tailed doe stepping through ferns,
her fawn close behind, still carrying its constellation of white.
On humid summer nights, the forest begins to flicker.
Fireflies thread their light between trunks, lantern after lantern
rising and vanishing in the dark. I stand on the porch, watching their slow pulse,
a quiet signal I do not yet know how to answer.
Some absences are not complete, only clouded.
Smoke from Canadian wildfires hides the mountains,
I can not recall their exact edges,
as if memory itself had thinned,
and something in me matches the blur,
a shape still present, but harder to name.
Still, there are days when I make the crossing.
Down the path, past the leaning pine,
through a forest stitched with maple, oak, and white pine.
I slow until the forest recognizes me. I do not speak.
A chickadee lands close enough that I feel the faint current of its wings.
In this moment, the distance between breath and bark dissolves.
Notes:
This piece reflects on what it means to live surrounded by the human and nonhuman world yet remain separated from it by the demands of work and the limitations of the body. It holds both the ache of absence and the brief, vivid fragments of connection, a hummingbird at the feeder, fireflies threading light through the forest, the sudden nearness of a chickadee, that remind me intimacy with the earth can be fleeting yet still sustaining. In a summer altered by wildfire smoke and shifting light, such moments feel like a kind of survival. They keep open the possibility of reciprocity, recognition, and care between human and more-than-human worlds, even when that intimacy is partial or clouded.
~~~~~
Tannin Lake
I float in the tannin-dark
alone but not lonely.
On shore, women’s voices rise and fall,
threads of laughter carried
just far enough to remind me I belong.
I let the lake lift what I cannot
the ache of joints the wear of weight.
The water folds around me,
on skin long starved for it.
Every bone remembers ease
as if the tannin-dark
were kin to blood and memory,
to the slow dissolve of everything into earth.
Notes:
Arthritis, that dull throb that flares up sharp when I move wrong, or sometimes when I don’t move at all. And the heaviness of weight, which is never just physical, never only pounds or pressure. It carries its own history: of shame, of dismissal, of jokes made at my expense, of clothes that don’t fit, of doctors who glance once and stop listening. The poem begins at that intersection of ache and release, with the body made porous to something other than itself.
The tannins are essential. That dark brown water, stained from leaves and roots, always looks a little like blood, a little like tea, a little like earth liquified. I think of it seeping into me, tinting my skin invisible beneath the surface, making me kin to what is below, soil, roots, and sediment. Floating there is a reminder that I am of this earth, carried by it, returned to it. The water is not neutral, it has color, flavor, depth; in it, my body feels less like a burden and more like part of something bigger, a system and a cycle.
There’s intimacy in this. It’s an intimacy with my own body, first of all. One that I struggle to hold in daily life, where pain and weight make me impatient, resentful, and estranged from my own flesh. In the water, though, I soften. My joints loosen, my muscles uncoil, my skin wakes. For a few minutes, I remember what it is to belong to myself without resistance. That’s a kind of love.
It’s also intimacy with the earth. Not abstract, but literal; water on skin, skin in water, the tannins connecting what falls from trees to what flows into me. It feels like a conversation that bypasses words. My body listens and answers in pulse and breath.
Even the voices on shore, though they fade into the background, serve as a tether. It’s enough to know the women are there, that I am part of something, without having to perform or speak. That too is intimacy, an ease of belonging that doesn’t require explanation.
Pain doesn’t vanish, exactly. I know it will return when I walk back onto land, shoes pulling on damp feet. But for a while, the lake lifts it from me. Carries it, dilutes it, makes it small enough that I can float. A temporary suspension that feels holy.
~~~~~
With Her I Never Feared Darkness
In the dark she knew me by touch alone
mapping me in a language that didn’t need sound.
We trusted our bodies more than words,
tongues spelling truths we’d never confess over coffee.
Every scar was an opening, every breath a tether.
Her thigh parted me like a question
and I answered without speaking
hips giving what mouth could not.
Her hand lingered at the base of my spine
steadying, urging
and I wanted to live there forever
between pulse and ache.
When the world woke we folded back
into names, into work, into shoes by the door.
But there, in that blessed blindness
we were only pulse and sweat,
the clench of fingers tangled in sheets
the holy grasp of finding and being found.
Notes:
Spoken language has always felt slippery in my mouth, twisting or dulling what I meant. I lose myself in conversation, clumsy in confession, certain I’ve failed at the rules of grammar the world demands. Yet there is another language where I am never uncertain. In touch, in the body pressed to another body, I am articulate.
The dark clears a space for that eloquence. Scar and breath, ache and pulse, all become speech. To trust this language of bodies over the sanctioned speech of daylight is to honor what is private, hidden, queer, embodied. It is to claim as sacred the truths that live outside conference rooms and polite exchanges. That is the essence I want to hold: the knowledge that my truest language does not require words at all. In the dark, with pulse and sweat, I am fluent.
About the Author
Kris Hege is a fat butch dyke living in Vermont. She spends her days as a Senior Data Systems Engineer. Formerly a faculty member at the Goddard Graduate Institute, she has spent decades engaged in learner-centered education, feminist theory, and social justice work. She is a lifelong learner who holds a Master of Arts in Feminist & Justice Studies from Goddard College and has completed doctoral coursework in Education for Social Justice. When not working or studying, she can often be found with a project in hand, knitting, crocheting, tatting, or bead-weaving, finding in these slow, tactile practices a kind of quiet persistence that shapes both her work and her life.
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