In the Trees

Here we go, once again making our way through a place so familiar this tangle of trails could be my husband’s laugh lines. For two decades we’ve witnessed this forest covered in summer grass, in golden leaves, or in a thick blanket of snow with the screaming wind driving sleet against our cheeks. We come back again and again.

It is by constantly returning to it that I’ve come to belong to this place–which, it turns out, is not merely a trail, or a bioregion, but rather a multidimensional story unfolding through time and space. Or, as I like to think of it, the page we are written into.

The year turns in a similar way. Oh January, I know you. I’ve walked this season before.

Here is a quote from a review of Refugia in World Literature Today. Bailey Hoffner is talking about my poems (blush), but imagine that this starts with “We are”

…songs made meaningful through accumulation, each part functioning within a larger ecosystem of constant mutual impacts; no single sound a wind unaware of its dependence on the trees surrounding it.

Lovely to think about, isn’t it?

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