I’ve been studying trees, how they grow in clusters
or rise singular and alone among the lesser flora,
passing their wisecraft to saplings or serving as sentinel,
alert for insects or woodsmen intent on destruction.
I’ve been watching trees navigate rivers and streams,
seen willows wash their leaves and sycamores cool their feet.
I’ve been touching trees, too. Their branches, smooth as corn
silk or stubbled like a lover’s chin, quiver at my touch.
When the day rises, I listen – to conifers, shivering poplars,
maples celebrating the wind’s kiss, each branch calling
across the prairie, meadow, field, forest. They murmur
in needled tongues, deciduous slang, then wait for me
to whisper back. I’ve dug up saplings, prying out
their crooked toes that latch the earth, sturdy balls
rooted where the heart begins and the wood extends,
tense above the bed I offer, until, when I return them
to the soil, they settle and sigh. Yes, I’ve been studying
trees, the clash and mutter, the sweet grace and flutter
of the lace-veined leaves, and in the mating of my mind
with theirs, I comprehend the consonance of heartwood
prose and taste the sap rising, meld with the sacred life
that hums, tuneless, beneath the bark of both our worlds.
—
Janet E. Irvin is an educator, poet, and the author of seven mystery/thriller novels under the name J.E. Irvin. Her poems have appeared in Hawaii Pacific Review, Creosote, The Raven’s Perch, and Sky Island Journal. A member of the Greenville Poets, Sisters in Crime, and Buckeye Crime Writers, Irvin resides in southwest Ohio on the edge of a nature park which serves as inspiration for her work.
