#nature tree

  The Trees Listen

When there is no room for me in any heart, I walk beneath the tallest pines. They close ranks around me, guardians, storehouses of living. A column of sunlight stabs into the dark forest and lights the litter of pine needles and old beer cans, while I deliver myself to the mercy of the woods.

The suspicious goose eyes me, the crush of last year’s leaves beneath my torn boot. She hears stranger, predator, interloper. Only this moment. But the forest hears it all, the years of drought and flood, the fire burnt edges, the bubbling up birth, the soft slide of tadpole body slipping from jellied womb, the high-school kids’ first inhale of reefer beneath the cool canopy of almost summer. The quilt of cicadas’ song falls heavily on her branches, the sounds seep beneath the interstitial sheath of bark and bud.

Gripped by the hawk’s arc, the rasping gasp enters the flux of xylem and phloem, held in the repository of measure and time in sweet crystalline chlorophyll born from sun imbued green.

The trees listen all day and night, to car noise, to the tremble of warped beech leaves and the sounds of freeze and thaw, to the acquiescence of the virgin snow, lay down upon the seeded mound of bear scat.