leaping greenly spirits

“I am haunted. I am haunted by valleys.

They sing to me deep in my dreams. So I wander, I wander these mountains just to find a lowland home for me to keep.”

“Winter. Time to eat fat and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,   a black fur sausage with yellow Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries   to get onto my head. It’s his way of telling whether or not I’m dead.”

Today I heard they're bulldozing a forest that is a sweet remnant of my childhood memory.

This stand of trees, they live like god planted index fingers in the earth and painted them with hair-thin, see-through branches. Planted on a diagonal. As our car would pass on the way through Oregon, I smudged the window with my preteen nose and pushed. The light skipped through and would blind me in a pulsing rhythm. I never closed my eyes. It was there, then it was not, then it was. And so on.

 I can feel them. I can feel how I dreamed of them as I sit at my kitchen window twelve years, ten years later. My palms itch with the longing I can so distinctly remember: to run my flat hand across their bark. I dreamed it was soft, so soft I could peel it back like tissue paper and stitch together a cloak and no one would ever find me and I would be gone forever, a tree myself. Although never quite as thin. Or tall.

I dreamed of running between their trunks, arms outstretched like some predatory bird, devouring wind and swallowing bugs and catching my fingers on their branches and spreading my blood on their skins and becoming them as they became me.

 I dreamed of a forever between those trees, and now there is no more forever but a clear good-bye.