"This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlock..."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A body of memory envelops my eyes as I waver in the paper birch stands, which keel over thick black shadows across the narrow forest path. This is a new wood when compared to what I can recall, all composed of wispy, bird-boned trunks and fragile branches. Early spring leaves still nestle snugly in buds so that the sun pours through the webs of skeletal wood, as if light has come to break the surface of the sky, an egg cracked open with a shot from the west. So sets the sun to blind my eyes, and with the yellow yolk of splattered, warm memories. Love signs fractured, fetal, and fills me suddenly with fraught wonder.

Beside me stands a girl who glistens as a mirror. Her hair is blonde. Her eyes are blue, as are mine. We wander through the fairy wood unsure of our own origins, the two of us having been born in a land where the woody trunks are red and thick, overbearing and phallic, and not wispy, not losing, not weak or new. To say whether or not we have retreated in time or merely sped up to meet the decay of an end is unknowable. To say whether or not we have forbidden or forgiven our histories cannot alter the sheer dissociative power of a wood like this. Of bird-boned branches that bring a woman to her knees, to weep.

"Lara," I say, to the mirror girl across the way as the robins harmonize, "the beech buds are unbearably spiky, standing over winter's ghostly leaves which still quiver so fixed to the branch. But if you break them apart," and I do. I delicately unravel the pointed scales of the Fagus, "the leaf is waxy, soft, infantile."

She nods seriously, as she does when she humors my rote and naked observations but says nothing at all aside from her recurring question, "Amelia," she asks, "where are we?" Her tone is highly anxious. I wish she would say something more.

And she knows, she knows the letter name and spatial dimensions that spit out "where we are" word by word, degree by degree of latitude and the like, but even so she cannot navigate to bring us home without a mechanistic voice singing songs of direction over the forum of the phone-computer. She continues to ask me, "Where are we?" and I wish she could quit playing the mirror for a minute, could stop relying on me to stand in front of her eyes to tell her just who she is and what she can be. I know half of her is me.

Despite the grumbling that comes from dragging along a shadow double, the sun's yolky reminder penetrates my heart and lends a lightness to my step. I cannot help but dance in spring, drawing up my affections toward the newness of the wildflower, so crisp and uniform and utterly young, so utterly clean and energized and drinking from that golden cup.

Waxy plant matter like the sheen of modern plastic, and I imagine the baby's pacifier that I find on the woody trail refusing to decompose, a plastic wildflower resembling eternal youth. While the baby grows old and someday dies, the pacifier only disguises its deceptive youthfulness beneath a thin layer of dust from forest abandonment. A baby's pacifier preciously refusing to set seed, to ever let go. To ever. What curses are eternal youth.

To every time the sun cracks over the west, the flower of my face yields over, open, to taste the light and to let go. Here is a pattern I know, and that I may never outgrow, for we are one: the light and I. The yolk I crave and the love I find in the light, even in this unfamiliar wood which funnels it so generously.

The love I seek, I find, and have found in the wood. The evocation of memory that a sunset uplifts in my fragile, bird-boned chest encloses a very tender heart that begins beating at the recollection of the miracle of the woods at all.

What happens in new stands? What happens in old, where the sun scarcely touches the densely knotted, rooted earth? So it feels like we are displaced by the past, and we are! Displaced by the past relative to ecological time. Where we are, the world is beginning again. Where we are, loving is something new and fertile and undone.

"Where are we?" Lara asks, again.

"Either the end of the world," I consider, "or the beginning." Somewhere in my memories the sun is yawning westward, and I am there, too, I am young and surrounded by the tallest reds, the oldest Sequoia to ever mother me. Somewhere in my memories the sun draws me southbound, and I am there, too, and I am younger still surrounded by old oak-hickory stands not nearly so steeped in wisdom and power but they are kind and generous, just-grown-up long enough to impose and impress upon me, deliver me in Love.

Somewhere in my memories, I am taken by delight with every taste of forest to alight my tongue and transport my body through time. Sequoia sempervirens knocks me out senseless, an ultimate love affair verging on the irrational, intoxicating. Quercus envisions me as a proper lady, laying down some sense of agency rooted in a perceived history of my memory as if I knew. As if I knew, I only knew I loved beneath those stands once. Now, the thin and blighted Betula bleeds sun light streaming in my eyes and, beckoning me back westward, I suffer from the swift envisioning that every forest stand represents some lover and the quarrel that springs. Beneath Betula, I belong to an older, more harried sense of myself. Deceived by the infancy of this enchanted country I call home, the paper bark proclaims this current, nervous self-reflection, these surrounding mirrors that pivot and spring a slight anxiety, a sense of placeless dreaming, and the echoes of recent, infantile heartbreak.

Lara wanders with me, though she does not read into the pummeling light throbbing west. That every wood is on its own a love sign means I might be right to say I've never been in love, not here, not in the company of the keen Betula, andnot in the way that it would make sense to poetize about it now. When I am with Sequoia, say another story, another self. And Quercus, well I blush red and forgetful. Where did my confidence run off to? The signs of place are temperamental.

Forest whispers forth. I want to quit living in this warped, backward mirror, so the two of us turn to go home. Pinus, Thuja, Prunus, oh, and many more loves to come, and they come. Every limb I prune from the trunks of our bodies is another eye to watch me from afar.