If you have not walked alone in the woods for some time

The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

-John Muir

If you have not walked alone in the woods for some time it will require an adjustment. You will feel unsettled as you step past a series of woodpiles, signs of humans not present in these woods in the past, again each of the four times you fail to see a spiderweb until it is wrapping around your face, across your mouth, swatting frantically at threads hoping the spider itself isn't pressed, sticky and writhing, to your lips

Then it's down to the water, no signs of herons or fish either but rolling along deep, swift, a blue-green both eerie and inviting. You don't skip stones because you are not entirely unconvinced that a limb will burst from the algae as you lean out across the current and pull you, screaming, and with no one to hear your cries but the spiders, in

So you stand on the stones by the water's edge picturing the deer carcass from winter--stiff and morbid and decomposing ever-so-slowly into the gully, its entrails drip-drip-dripping into the creek. That deer may be in this water now, for all you know, parts of it anyway, blood and guts and decaying leaves swirling together, pulsing up and back down again into the murk wrought by summer storms