Grateful and Greedy for Grass Underfoot

a poem about writing a poem about a tree

One Hundred Days of Gratitude. Twenty-four.

No one told me the trick. You can’t write about a tree unless you’re in its shade.

A good one anyway. A true one anyway.

Follies flights of fancy heights and depths of holy humanity all of it and us and more can be deftly described behind closed doors.

Odes to unrelenting love can be written safely on the bus in your head or boozed up in bed.

But a mountain bends for no man and neither do its words and the sound of saccades can’t be summoned up in New York

no matter how much absinthe you drink —

all the different greens become one when we look away.

You can’t hear the wind dance through them in your head and photons in flight don’t light creations colors on fire

quite the same way in your mind’s eye.

Until today, I thought nature was a muse meant for only the most natural among us, now

I see. I had to be swimming in it to even try and put a drop onto the page.

And somehow she’s still as ineffable as the life that she made.

You can’t write about a tree unless you’re in it’s shade—

and even then