The Giving

Walk through woodlands,

dried pine droppings and moss giving

beneath your feet. Tree roots,

their underground thoughts rising

in you, toes dipping into the fern-pool

of a swamp earth; peat, anthracite,

the mulch of other lives. Wherever you touch bark,

you overflow, rough ridges and the soft branch

tissue of lichens. You reach into earth shadows,

slide darkness through your fingers; the woods

come closer, lift you out of your feet

into blotted leaf rhythms and beech sounds;

you, a light chestnut splash on the earth, a space

for eavesdropping, nothing but the moment

to go by. Time gathers in hollow trees,

you hatch into memory, move through it like a moonslide

through water. Beneath the spine of a broad leafed fern,

you slip into the root of knowledge,

follow the damp soil-song; stem-shape, leaf-form, tuber-curl;

over the edge into the continuance of all,

beyond every separate and singular thing.