Judith Chalmer

When I enter the forest, what I’m seeking, mainly, is intimacy. In my poem, “Habitus,” I’m seeking a place, both spiritual and physical, among bits and pieces of plant matter from the forest floor. Recently, I’ve begun creating small figures out of those bits, which I collect and bring to my workbench in the back of the garage. But however pleasurable it is to put those pieces together, it isn’t the making of a new form that creates the intimacy I seek. Rather, it’s the noticing and imagining, the sorting pieces of bark, for instance, into piles based on the size of the holes that have bored into them; or branches based on varying thickness, curves, or elbows; seed pods by segmentation that brings me the relationship I seek. Fingering silken, lichen-crusted, bristly things, I begin to feel acquainted with them. Maybe, too, it’s because I’m getting older that I’m touched by things that, once supple, have stiffened, that, once part of the enterprise of a growing plant, have fallen off and become part of a different, if no less significant, process. In that way, they come to fit and maybe nourish the questions I turn over and over in my poems.