Dark Cloud Country: Chapter Seven, Love Carved Lovers Live

"On the forest’s floor, golden leaves still pinnate held firm the vanishing verve of summer’s vitality, and hollowed hulls were strewn noisily about."

This is the seventh chapter of my newest book, Dark Cloud Country: The Four Relationships of Regeneration. You can buy the book here.

Love Carved Lovers Live

I often dream about perfectibility and adjectives and grasshoppers and clouds. Yesterday, it carried me to a sunlit spot in our wildwoods that I had never been before. Aged stinkhorn deliquesced on its side—a decomposing spear thrust into yesteryear. It was faithfully employed on a fallen pignut hickory, and it unhurriedly worked to accomplish its eternal task. Infinitude worked slowly upon the filigree of the mortal and the mundane. Witches’ butter jellied in the tightly crevassed and now moistened bark, consuming that which consumes, a parasite of parasites. On the forest’s floor, golden leaves still pinnate held firm the vanishing verve of summer’s vitality, and hollowed hulls were strewn noisily about. Nature never wastes a good meal and the squirrels in their compunction had long since carried off any opportunity of neglect. But sound was absent, a rotting ruckus that silence made complete. Not complete, whole. Complete implies that a part had been missing, a bolt in a jittery engine perhaps. But forests have no engines and they do not jitter. They just have souls that glimmer.

The forest mourned its passing friend, but it also rejoiced. While hewing humans prize hickory for handles and heat, Nature in her eternal patience knows better. Fallen trees also make for great grounds for the playful squirrel, dense homes for the burrowing beetle, melodious podiums for the winter nuthatch’s metronome, anchors for the transitory mycology, and objects of imagination for you and me. They are the hallowed halls of the wildwoods.