Why so still, they ask,
why so heavy on the crisp needles
your crush-grass, moss-wheezy, flopsy limbs?
You sad?
Your roots not fingering down
into the soil and playing
with stones and small tunnels,
voles,
beetle shells?
Not sifting the crumbled leaves?
You clomp.
We is what was planted or what sprouted,
willy-nilly,
in a thin topsoil.
Blown about, swept off, leached soil, ploughed
by mule and tractor, shattered.
We rises
and looks down from our branches
to you on the leggy grass.
We flies
in dirt that’s good enough already
and each year better, all duff, mould-leaf, caked pollen.
We knows
otherwise.
We gives way, takes advantage,
climbs up and over gravel and spoil heaps,
we is briars and creeper.
Water runs through we culverts,
we climbs up the eyes of wire-mesh fences
and trickles down.
We rots, we stumps and stump-holes,
we years of loblolly needles
drip and drape and shiver and skitter.
We trunks spiraled by vines, we vines.
Say, you come be post oak saplings and
yearlings, young cedars with us,
purple us foxgloves behind this split-rail fence.
Maura High 