I begin with a spell for the trees.

I kneel down. I place my words on an altar of mycelium and roots. I breathe in all that you respirate. I exhale. You breathe in what I cannot use. How literally you give me my life.

I wrap my arms around the oldest maple tree in our woods

snow comes.

a crow presses air
with wide black wings

the breath
of that bird’s flight
a benediction of wind
from sky to skin.

I step onto your roots –
fat and toughened
as old snakes –
your furrowed bark
stubbles my bare fingers.

You insist on strength
require responses
so I extend my arms
around your trunk
press my palms in
draw my torso to yours

I rely on your topography
to forget how I speak
(and why).

and maybe you rely on me
to know your body
as snow knows the way
to curl into crevice and twig
to linger touching your skin.

I rest my cheek on your husk
I swear you press back

all roughened layers
all sweet sweet sap

~~~~~

Waking on the first morning of spring

my bent leg rests on your thigh
your palm warms my belly
wind through open windows cools my face.

barred owl gold-taloned haggard
fluffs mottled feathers grips an apple branch
listens for voles scuttling beneath thin snow.

arctic hawk who has taken two chickens
waits yellow-eyed silent as a shadow
on a fence post near the coop.

we all have our hunger
me for what is here hip and tongue
the smooth plane of your chest
for what is gone the hold of longer colder seasons.

up the hill
silver birches dangle silk tassels
on bare branches
papery beech leaves cling
unwilling to fall

if the forest spoke, it might say listen
though what it asks for is a lump in the throat
your body pressed to tree or ground
duff thickening your nails.

or it might say forgive
morning after inevitable morning
you next to me winter’s thick bone gone.

~~~~~

For the burning trees and for my friend, Sasha,
who fled California wildfires to Vermont

She wakes on an enflamed street
where who she knew and why
becomes a news item.

Sky an impossible black tornado
takes whole forests up into it.

She wants air.

Into the car she piles blankets, tents, two dogs
tells her four children:
Bring one small belonging you wish to keep.

They drive east
through dark architecture
of flaming trees
against a charcoal sky.
On smoke roads birds flutter,
flee in cypress and fir.

In a Vermont forest at the end of winter
I am not alone in my search for meaning
in a season of gentle warnings:

Last spring arrived in thunder, flood
collapsing tons of silt and stone
into houses that washed

down

and down

downstream…

this spring, grass barely greens
as last fall’s leaves and pine needles crisp
among tinder of root and duff.
fire danger: high
as Sasha’s car rumbles up
the dirt road to my house.

Together, we walk a parched woods trail
sit side by side on a stump.
Our warm palms crush
brown maple leaves to dust.

Where can I place my feet
without feeling a traitor
to what and whom
I have loved?

once
spring storms brought
swirls of falling snow

how easily it nestled
in the upturned arms of trees.

Notes:

From the back door of my house in eastern Vermont, I can walk among trees for several miles without crossing roads. Forests of sugar maple, ash, beech, hop horn beam, white pine, and white spruce comprise ninety percent of the town where I have lived for twenty-three years.

Most days, I walk the same familiar forest paths.

I listen as leaves flutter in wind, as branches creak and moan. I cool off in dappled shade, marvel at the grace of naked winter limbs, make a nourishing tea with white pine needles. Tree branches reach out to me. I reach back to them.

Our lives are entwined. Intimate.

I touch their bark. They shed soft leaves onto me. I lean my back against their solid trunks. Wind rubs the highest branches together in eerie wails and soothing bass-voiced songs. No matter how I feel when I walk into their presences – smiling with delight, in tears, rigid with anger, or weary – I am invited to walk among them just as I am.

I feel an intimacy with the forest as true and deep as any I share with the humans closest to me–those who know me in all my moods, love me anyway, and whom I love the same way in return.

I offer this suite of three poems as a triptych of praise songs to the forest. In the way that root, trunk, and branch create harmonic balance in a tree, and thereby, in the whole forest, I hope the poems create a harmony of three in image, sound, and idea. I weave in echoes of human intimacy.

Though the reality of our changing climate is present in the work, the mycelial connections trees make with each other inspire me to find and make rooted connections with the human and other-than-human beings in my life. To remember that intimacy sustains.

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