Solitude Late at Night in the Woods

Robert Bly

Robert Bly is the author, editor, and translator of numerous collections of poetry. Among his recent books are The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (HarperCollins, 2001), American Poetry: Wilderness and Domesticity, The Winged Life (about Henry David Thoreau), Iron John: A Book about Men, and his collected prose poems, What Have I Ever Lost by Dying? He lives near Minneapolis, Minnesota. "Solitude Late at Night in the Woods” was originally published in Silence in the Snowy Fields (Wesleyan University Press, 1962).

The body is like a November birch facing the full moon
And reaching into the cold heavens.
In these trees there is no ambition, no sodden body, no leaves.
Nothing but bare trunks climbing like cold fire!

II

My last walk in the trees has come. At dawn I must return to the trapped fields.

To the obedient earth.

The trees shall be reaching all the winter.

III

It is a joy to walk in the bare woods.

The moonlight is not broken by the heavy leaves.

The leaves are down, and touching the soaked earth,

Giving off the odor that partridges love.