If you walk slowly enough or are willing to stop and double back, then sometimes you’ll see the bottoms of raindrops through the translucent cup of a leaf.
This weak, mid-day dapple wrecks me. Find me burrowed in a bed of damp fir needles. Find me humming melancholy love songs under my breath. Find me and feed me warm honey.
This tree told me it wanted to feed the world and sit with us (the bug and bird part of us) while we ate. Keep company it offered to each of the humans walking by, wrapped in coat and mask.
We have so many skies for each other. Are those Hong Kong clouds the same ones that rode above the Pacific to Portland? Is that fog in Porto just another cool, damp exhale from the same wintery lungs?
I went to the hill ringed in woods. The mountains swam toward me across a sea of grass.
They attempted to capture the tree, not knowing it would only succumb to clouds and night.
I used to sit at the foot of F.’s bed and rub her aching feet. Her souls hadn’t felt the earth in years. She would hum her pleasure, barely audible beneath the disembodied voices of the Hallmark Christmas movies that bubbled from the tv behind me. A year later, she is still here. Somehow, still here. So am I. With closed eyes, I imagine my palms pressed into her souls. For a second, I am earth.
This feast. The same glossed red fruit offered over and over and over. The crow stands in the middle of the road and eats leftovers snagged from an overflowing garbage can.
This is park not wild forest. These are trees not waves. Or so they say.
My body chose sit, lie, slow, sleep. No chance for resistance. Only rest. Once you get so soaked by the rain you can stop trying to get out of its way.
This tree told me to move in close with an open palm. They told me to not forget the joy of smooth/flat interrupted by small/round. All the things that hands know.
This tree’s limbs were already carried away. Their torso sliced and stacked in pieces. They didn’t want pity. They wanted a minute of my time to show off their scars and tell me stories of our long, adventurous life.
Bundled together. Patient. The hum of next buried deep in the day’s bright shiver.
Mold grows on the sandwich bread that didn’t get eaten quickly enough. Fruit flies appear, like magic, on the rim of my bourbon-filled glass. The chipped lines of the alley fence are open doors for moss and lichen. New life everywhere. Welcome.
Tracy Burkholder 
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