a vegetational sequence
[1] clearings enclosed by trees
are yet elementary stages,
silent embryos in the making
[2] the quiet wood you sit in
was once a sun-crushed expanse,
cut through by gusts,
a bare slope washed over by storms,
yet filling slowly with new snow,
a moor seemingly useless to seeds,
inhospitable to rodent burrows,
a place that has never been anything
but an arid plain or one that has become so,
where the mute, passing living dry up,
and the cradles of the dead rock in depth
[3] pioneering gorses and brambles came over time
when what little of a season sufficed;
they began founding kingdoms of roots
beneath roots that no one heard,
and in the varying diameters
of trunks, the echo of leaves
[4] they dig and blend layers
into the subconscious of the field,
and hold earth and stones together,
and scatter fluffy seeds
from their finest filaments
[5] each time the muscles of the mountain tense,
the tangle of the strong vegetable veins
cracks and the sparse wings of crickets vibrate
in rounds, loosening the links of silence
[6] the rule thus established: the death of one
barely offsets another’s strength
[7] surfacing roots taper and mime grass,
drink vaporous gradients of rain seeped
in the porous bark as the packed soil cools
[8] cold, fleeting breezes entangle themselves
in the sharp friction of well-suited shrubs,
bare resinous twigs resonate
on the face of an uncovered earth
[9] gathered for a common task, here come fieldfares
and waxwings, wild hogs, and solitary jays,
roe deer in pairs on a late strip of snow,
biting the tips of buds, breath by breath,
no louder than a leaf sprout
[10] waves of thirsty bees swarm over luminous pollen
of flickering flowers that the half-light dims,
till the outspread darkness of deciduous trees
binds the woods as one,
the constellation of leaves they are absorbed in
[11] trees advance toward the wood, uncurling their limbs,
unmoving under the aerial lintel of winds,
as migrating birds asked them to
pause their flight and miss their destination
[12] yet roots go deep into earth, trace their way to water
in silence, a regular beat in the birthplace
that defines another tree on a larger scale
for the kingdom to come
[13] fluff of long stems and leaves,
shallow ponds of endless shadow
layers, where families of ferns are bent,
where dust-bearing buds floated and sank
when no one visited them any longer
[14] cracked barks whose substance has slowly disappeared,
whose grief slid through the earth, immaterial
[15] winds refracted through random lattices
of twisted branches split and dragged
against formidable barriers of trunks
will blend the architectures of larches
with the graceful profiles of birches,
the scaled umbrellas of firs,
and the definitive vanishing points of beeches
[16] the original surface now serves as an abstract principle,
an arc of silence, a submerged layer
on which the wood hinges