“Lost in the Woods is a symptom/of heart’s sudden loss/of direction registered in small/persistent cramps and little gasps.”
i.
Lost in the Woods is a symptom
of immaculate intent caught
in quagmire’s etymological
dispersion into late 16th century,
first use 1579, stunning if you
stop and wonder how do they
know that, it’s just a distant sound
Chaucer’s air ybroken in Time’s
river roar, but then recorded
brings it down to this stuff, scratch,
scratch, click, click noise of fix’s
longing for the sound, no quag
allowed, though you can no more escape
quags than fly to the—we used to say moon,
but that’s out now as some corporate
Entity is flying there as we speak,
having plundered this place
to the point of falling apart—there
may not even be a Woods
to get lost in by the time they’re
done with us—now they’ve got
the moon in their sights and she’s
not going to be happy, it’s bad enough
Neil Armstrong left bags of frozen
piss there, one small piss for mankind,
that old male marker staining her alabaster
face, now they plan to bring in machines
rip her open, dig into her body
with drills and claws, rape her
while wounded Earth watches lust
for gold (and lithium) foul all human
connection to celestial orbs
and their spirits rendering the Woods,
her demesne after all, Private
Property properly posted Stay Out
and cinched with a tall fence
ii.
for Joe Napora
Lost is the Woods is a symptom
of disorientation thinks soul
is given when it has to be earned, you
have to learn to hear the stones’
morning song roused with the warmth
of first light the crows rise to, black
cloud ruckus, joy cacophony stones
can’t match at those frequencies
still, lithodomous buzzes with familiar
fit, home sweet home, star light’s port
in morning’s mystery, if we knew anything
we wouldn’t be here, Jack said, where
do you come from being a question
unheard in all the noise we take
for furniture, meubles Olson said,
someone left us in familiar arrangement
holds us in position reminiscent
of pretzels which we take for
the Perilous Path having forgotten
how to listen to the stones’ song
iii.
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree
—Joyce Kilmer
Lost in the Woods is a symptom
of Uncertain’s disdain for literary
drainage project’s war on the swamp,
what the quag did to deserve that
remains a road not taken,
a stand the line insists on even as
paradisum voluptatis beckons
seductively down the page, salvaged
from trips through imaginal wilderness,
and left there as a kind of strange
attractor or angelic lover
which you could just delete
as happens more often than
you’d hope given the current
poverty of imagination and blood
lust’s compulsory sides, kerchiefs
Emerson had it, blind folded
and certain their righteous
opacity will win, a little paradise
could lighten things up, slip in a few
laughs, stakes being what they are,
Blake’s Albion haunting the arras—
an allusion to numerous old poets
like Shakespeare and Eliot, and Blake of course,
which establishes this as a serious poem
with its eye on the quagmire—or
stumbling down an alley three sheets
to the wind, badly in need of a place
to piss, a long way from the Woods
if you use Newton’s Ruler but right there
deep in shadow, trees here
trees there, if you swerve past him
into topographical contortions
of imaginary Realities where paradise
is just another day
picking your way through words
iv.
Lost in the Woods is a symptom
of heart’s sudden loss
of direction registered in small
persistent cramps and little gasps
signify breath’s reluctance or some
heart felt absence, a little void
appears in the right ventricle, passes
through pulmonary valve into the left
one where it implodes into a small
black hole, a new sense of cardio
interruptus, but then death
always lurks in the shadows
or for that matter lounges in the sun,
at this point she might as well be
my best friend, constant companion
little noted, just there every day
at eye’s edge, a small difference
in the angle of light and meaning
collapses, though maybe prolapses
is more like it, the bottom falls out
of the heart and grotesque love
protrudes, judgment in its eyes
its lips deny, leaks onto the floor
hardens into a sticky pool
v.
who reads
with her eyes closed,
translates syllables
spoken by oak leaves,
smoke in the wind,
hum of bees, goat liver,
ring in the mouth of a fish
— Billie Chernicoff
Lost in the Woods is a symptom
in search of a cause in Uncertain’s
swerve past Newton’s last stand
into a cosmos swirls in green
eyes across a table, a cosmos
distended with blood’s rush
into archaic channels governed
by scent and swells, inflamed with light
leaks through holes in night’s mask
into names’ swollen beyond
and within, each blade of Walt’s
grass, each star’s blaze, god-stuff,
Aphrodite being a string
of syllables taut with skin’s
thrill to touch, tongues’ grapple
with knowledge of ancient love,
and love to come, souls bound
each to each, rendered here
in memory’s shared syllables
uttered in the dark
i.
Lost in the Woods is a symptom
finally of Uncertain’s confusion
of hearts—his, hers, whose
is it beats so fiercely it recalls
depths of knowing the sea harbors
in its salty womb where one
is two and two sit across a strange table
from each other wrapped in a warm murmur
whose sybilline overtones ring
with prophecy’s language uttered
in a calculus of flesh and light,
of arms and hands, of eyes, of mouths
unable to tell whose tongue unfolds
lambent naught, labile entrance
into a secret binds surprise in loves’
embrace, in lucid dreams hold out hope
for some zone of meeting unfettered
by duty’s demands, the claim of ordinary’s
daily round, through orders of fidelity
that precede cardiac supernovas no one
expected or old visions of a burning house
echo with salvation even as doom’s
shadow flickers within the flames. The Woods
reek of tenebrous reaches where another
seeks a way toward you, godly encounter
that heats the world with what burns
in heart’s longing, sea washed eyes, green
glass smoothed in watery caress, look
out from where She is born, whose gifts
bring down empires littered with bodies
pile up in the wake of her casual
passage, as if nothing matters but her gift
a delicate flame beneath my skin
Sappho said, and trembling seizes my body
bittersweet, irresistible, loosening limbs
leaves warrior and poet alike
down on their knees, gasping for breath, pleading
show me a way through this beauty.
Michael Boughn’s most recent books of poetry are The Book of Uncertain: A Hyperbiographical User’s Manual, Book 1, which was released with Spuyten Duyvil in 2022, and Uncertain Remains, which was released with BlazeVOX in 2022. A collection of essays, Measure’s Measures: Poetry and Knowledge was published by Station Hill in 2024. He is currently working on Book 2 of The Book of Uncertain.
