ob.i

rain strikes the pine needles with a shush in the sky,
a whispering of the foliage to remind you to walk softly through its carpet of
brown and browning ancestors with care and honour. but you don’t hear the
shush, not the way the lynx you don’t know is there hears the shush, slinking
beneath a natural arch made by a fallen, half rotten log, propped on a rock,
pads without stirring its ancestors, without tipping you of its presence. the
shush is language the lynx understands. to you it is a noise, a pleasant noise,
whose language is lost to you in the meandering, confused workings of your
mind, your annoyance with raindrops soaking you and your pack while dotting
your glasses, and the clanking of carabiners on the back of your pack to ward
off bears. you don’t see the lynx stopping in the underbrush to watch you
clamber your way through the forest, cracking long fallen branches and crunching
third generation leaves the way a bulldozer overturns earth.

















the lynx sees you, though, and understands that
you don’t understand.