Tonight I ask: were the trees really that soothing
to me as a child, when I walked past sycamore
and redcedar in the woods not far from home,
or is that just revision—a mind drawing dark
protective timbers around a life that was,
if I’m honest, formless as plasma, shifting
this way then another. If I listen long enough
(believe this or not) I can hear past the story
as I’d like others to hear it, back to the story
the forest told: oak trees on the streambank
both healthy and ill, abandoned shed not
haunted or blessed, just rotting. Metabolizing.
What I remember is the gratitude being real:
glad to have seen a redcedar, boughs lifting
and falling in a breeze too light to feel. Glad
even for the honeysuckle’s lurid red fruit,
for the mud that closed one trail -fork and sent
me back on a loop, that led me to a spot
I ignored on the way out. Gratitude for
rereading in a life that flows only one way.