Cosmic Turtles, Part One

This is the first installment of a five-part post.

Always it’s the same: the woods are leaf-fatted, midsummer.   Low-growing Mayapple and ginseng creep among roots of massive white oaks whose limbs form their own green-clouded groves.   Ferns half my height unroll from fiddleheads.   Fiddleheads, with their scrolled fronds, put me in mind of unborn things €”pale, web-footed, half-creatures in dark, damp places, curling over upon themselves. All around lies the litter of conversion, of life changing over to death, changing to seedbed, to mushroom clusters, to a pink shock of Lady’s-slipper orchid against decadent leaves.

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