The Meaning of Trees
The Meaning of Trees
Split the trunk of an ancient one.
Count the rings like hidden weddings brought to light.
Know I’ve been wanting to come to die here,
for the longest while. My brown limbs as roots.
White men I’ve longed for have walked face-first
into the rainforest and misunderstood it so
beautifully. Sonnets to the otherness they find dripping
from the stems of their long fingers.
After I fuck them, will you eat them raw?
Trees, I want to die and die in you. No other arms.
No other branches coroneting the sky.
No other aviaries for corbeau and kiskadee. Kiss me.
Before I was awaiting death in the life I hold now,
plump and feral as a grass-fed lamb, I was
Yours. I planned how I would construct my funerary bower
in your arms, gird myself all over
with liana, a blanket of sphagnum moss plucked from
your bedroom floor. My eyelids green.
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