Notes from Trees

1. The Wise Tree

Read the ground,
Read the gasping shreds left underhoof,
Stop crunching them.

Read tightened stems and storied bark,
Reading crisped rivers of written lines.
Read the letterforms of the veins,
Read the curl, the browning like smoldering paper:
Read the edges of the darkened spots of leaves.
Learn them.


2. The Sweet Olive Tree

Pluck a flower.
These blossoms, nose-tickling
As white clouds,
As cool, crisp air.

Let It waft from your fingertips
As they crush the scent, bright
As bark and plant-fiber, bound
As if little bouquets with woven ribbons.

3. The Redbud Tree

Avoid the sight of me until spring –
When my leaves are wet and red,
When my flowers unfold like a newbown fawn
When its legs are stick-thin and unsure in that season
When my tender petals
Are budding out flush pink.

Remember that me,
Erase all other revisions.


4. The oldwood tree
Listen for my creaking --
Listen for my branches, where the wood
Listens to the dryness and lets in water, and
Listen! Insects creep
Listening to the edges of my grain.

Please do some trimming.
Let new growth come.

5. The rustling tree

Catch the sound
Caught in a breeze so light it
Catches against your ear like the edges of hand.

Catch the voices of those airy spirits
Caught in the cages of my twigs –
Catch in your hand the sung- out rustling

Understandings from cloud-tips.
Keep them close.

6. The old oak tree

Let the light
Fall on you in puddles
In drops like rain
Or dapples on the back of a wild horse.

Let my branches shield you
As I do crows, or the squirrels
Who crawl across
The landscape of branching rivers I create.

Let me thank you for exhaling,
For making the breath
I breathe.


7. The Dreaming Tree

Look at me
In January,

Look when I am bare
And covered in bright moons, and

Butterflies made from stars,
Stark against the night.

That world, that gaze –
That’s all I wish for.