Abigail Cloud

Everywhere I’ve ever been, I’ve been most comfortable when in a suspended-time moment in which my body and the trees and the ground are unified. Even as a child, I spent as much time as possible in the trees or by the lake. I was tempted to say “alone,” but that self-quiet space is inhabited by the little but elaborate sounds of all the life an outside place can contain: cedar waxwings in treetops, toads and chipmunks in the leaves, a deer hoof in mud, wind hitting a pine tree, which is different from wind hitting a cottonwood. They say that stargazing is best when you let your eyes adjust from light to dark. Outside, it’s just as important to let your ears adjust, away from human sounds and into the earth. 

Sometimes, the deep listening will pick up even smaller tendrils of not-sound, a sort of thrum or interpretation of which we can’t quite be conscious. Sometimes it’s danger. Sometimes it’s love. Sometimes it’s both. From these, for me, the poems move.