Heartwood

"I always thought you were made of trees,"
He said to me
To be so seen
Is a green kind of sadness
It feels so new—tiny shoot
Proof of life
Does that mean I was invisible before?

Ok but let me be oak
My branches curved back down to earth
The reaching and bowing a perpetual arc
Rainbow on the horizon

I embrace in all directions
I live one hundred years
I remember everything in the
Language of my heartwood

And when I dream, it's not of trees
But of placing quartz
In the cold end of the stream
Where the moonlight catches
The crystal flakes
Showing the fish where to go—
A checkerboard of crooked arrows
Pointing you back again and
Again to a numb and nameless
Deep