Forests undo me with their brilliance and depths of clarity. Every forest has its own flavor, but each one I’ve come across has altered me forever. And no matter the thousand and one journeys I’ve taken among the trees, I’m always, always itchy to return…

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WISDOM OF WOOD

We are among the grains of wheat,
atomizing the vapors of earth,
giving breath to seed, to habits of growth.

Our faces, in childhood,
let every secret slip
until our voices were broken.

The temptation was always too strong.
Our fervor destroyed everything we touched.
Even ourselves.

Especially ourselves.
And the way we interpreted the world,
winding our minds inside its papier-mâché damp.

Our innocent tongues worshiped
the benign qualities of wood in summer,
in autumn, in rain.

Our senses, though, were shaken in prologue
to a forest of fusion and dignity
standing among the remains of unsettled things.

Hiding among the wheat that brought us here,
we chained ourselves to the wisdom of consequences
while the forest, alone, disassembled us.

Overwhelmed, in shreds of our former selves,
the temptation was now only to be
what we knew to be true. Better. Unbroken.

But maybe, sometimes broken is better.
We can see from eyes other than our own
and the forest, dark now, becomes palliative.

Maybe that is a form of wholeness,
when we own nothing except our hands;—
our eyes looking into the details of wood.

Wood that is no longer benign,
but significant. It offers ancient lullabies
that give history form and substance.

It is a growing relic, individual and whole
in a way we don’t see ourselves as being.
Carved into usable things,

it grows stronger somehow.
And we find we are not as unlike wood
as we once thought we were.

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