Well Bottom Blues

The mind wanders.

The material
concentrates.

—Rae Armantraut , “Thrown”

Concentrates only when the mind ceases to wander and the eye of the poet pauses at an object of curiosity or wonder, when the material is, like the repertoire of the comedian, the material. Through focus we conjure.

My unquiet mind is as restless as the Mississippi kites hunting  mosquitoes when I arrive at the forest. There is something about the drive through Lakeview, that redoubt of Reagan pirate McMansions and monster trucks and SUVs, that focuses the mind on the derailment of society that is the modern United States.  It is only after I arrive and take out my walking stick that I can begin to think in forest. 

I just wrote a poem about the mysteries of quantum physics, how a thing does not exist in the way we commonly understand it, until it is observed.  The forest is like that in a way,  the artful confusion of trees and understory in a managed arboretum, a gestalt experience in which the particular only comes fully into mind when the feet and eyes and mind stop moving.

I disagree with Amrmantrout’s assertion,  unless she means the detritus of a cluttered house. In nature things are not fully there in the human mind until they are fully seen: the pattern of color in the wings and the veins of the leaf, bark like a species fingerprint imprinted on the eye as in a drinking glass.

Unlike the joggers and trail runners I don’t come to the forest to elevate my heart rate but to slow it. Immersion in a field of green and birdsong will do that if one does not run or obsessively count steps and pace but, as Edwin Muir put it, saunters. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests it is an adoption from Middle English meaning adventure. They quote but dismiss the suggestion it comes from the Norman French Saincte terre, and was used to describe those who made pilgrimages.

I saunter in the forest in both senses, as a small brush with adventure and as pilgrimage to a holy place.