The Forest
by Theodora Goss

You took a photograph
of the forest.

At first I was not in it,
just the trees
made amethyst by twilight.

And then I was,
as though you had imagined me
into the rising mist,
or conjured me out of it.

I was a moth, with luminous
wings, fluttering
aimlessly over the mossy carpet
of the forest floor,
among the ferns that raised their curled fronds
like green fists.

And then a fox, glimmering
under the trees, the white tip of my tail
moving like a ghost.
What was I stalking so purposefully? Perhaps
a frightened mouse that disappeared
into its burrow.

And then I was a tree myself,
an aspen, quivering,
as nervous as a young girl
at her first evening party,
dressed in white bark, with the gold leaves
of my hair forming a diadem
for decoration.

Finally, I became
the pale disk of the moon
rising through the trees,
winking at you
with the gray crater of my eye —
my mischievous love,
who takes me
through so many transformations.

(The image is Beech Forest by Gustav Klimt.)