I remember how it has grown these years.
Yet the spring pinecones are still young,
soft and gentle as skin to the touch, It is always the green season here, even with future amber formed golden from bark with the scent of animal life that passed through. If a traveler should pass by, it’s summons, Stop, come in, stay. I remember one poet taking a branch of pIne from the winter forest to his dying sister. It was all she wanted in her last moment. I have never forgotten the snow dripping from that branch to the floor. It is what I want, too, not so much to have a branch taken away, but for myself to be taken to this world my own life passed through as it does now in the shadows where sun filters in to melt snow, quench earth, that water dripping from the trees. You smell it, too, so let’s remain a while in its shade. How I love this forest, where the hieroglyphs of insects work the inner layers of bark like monks writing unseen in deep silence, and if you know the true secret of falling you might summon that magic language. I know prayers rise with smoke the way some people are so perfectly uplifted from their first roots. But when this life of trying is finally over, bring to my bed a small branch smelling of green forest, the melting pure water of snow, these mysteries discovered one more time.
