When no one
is looking
she touches
the wound
that hides
beneath
her smile
where the scion
of acceptance
was grafted
to her rootstock
of stubbornness.
Most people
don’t notice
the scar,
focused as they are
on the fruit,
but she
remembers
the cut,
the tissue exposed.
How tenderly
she traces
that place
where the union
was formed.
Since the wounding,
her fruits
have become
vibrant, complex,
so sharp, even tart,
and so sweet.
Posts Tagged ‘tree’
At the Center of the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged apple, garden, grief, growth, orchard, tree, wound on May 2, 2026| Leave a Comment »
Almost Effortless
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, contentment, grace, nature, peacefulness, seeing, tree, walking on January 2, 2026| 4 Comments »
A humble contentment.
Because blue green spruce
by the creek bed.
Because ancient red
of sandstone cliffs.
This almost forgettable moment
not forgotten.
This small seeing.
This ease in being, unearned.
Because the tips of the spruce
are more silver, softer.
Because afternoon mist
somehow mingles it all.
Because sometimes when I try,
I cannot feel the connection.
This moment when trust is.
This sinking of my foot
into slick, wet earth.
This small thing.
This everything.
The Layers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, cottonwood, layers, self-protection, tree, vulnerability on December 6, 2025| 6 Comments »
Furrowed and runnelled and rough,
the gnarled bark of this old cottonwood.
The dead thickness protects living tissue
from cold, from wind, from flames.
I, too, am older, but somehow survival
shows up for me the opposite.
Any shields I would build up as barriers—
life keeps peeling them away.
What thickens around me now are layers
of dynamic compassion—vital, vulnerable,
ever-growing. They do not protect
against wounds. Instead, they seem to say,
Be with what aches, my dear. Trusting
discomfort is the only way.
Ginkgo in Downtown New York
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, endurance, gingko, tree on November 24, 2025| 10 Comments »
They live a thousand years.
This, alone, is enough to
invite admiration. Robust.
Unfussy. They survive drought,
disease, pollution, pests.
They thrive in the midst of sirens
and car fumes, gridlocks and
garbage cans, concrete and horns.
And all across the city today,
a golden fluttering, a radiant trembling
on even the darkest streets. As if
to endure is not enough. As if we are
also here to burn bright, to shine, to offer
to the world every scrap of beauty we can.
Enter Here
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged growth, tree on August 25, 2025| 4 Comments »
At the same time
a tree grows
in two directions,
toward darkness,
toward light.
Come, look through
the door of the heart.
Do you see how you,
too, are made of roots
and leaves?
The door opens and opens.
Do you see how you,
too, are a tree?
Evergreen
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged language, memory, tree on January 12, 2025| 8 Comments »
Skiing up the railroad grade
we pause to catch our breath
and from somewhere in the woods
a tree speaks to us in a spruce language
we can’t interpret,
and I am again a young girl
at the edge of the forest,
believing I understand the trees,
the way they call to me,
primal and true.
How did I ever forget?
Impossible Task
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged stillness, tree on July 21, 2024| 8 Comments »
For two hours this morning
I practiced being a tree.
Sat in one place in the sun
and did not move. Offered
shade to ground below.
Did not speak. Did not plan.
And though no bird chose
to nest in my lap, was not
averse to such nesting.
Imagined eating light.
To anyone else, it looked
like a woman sitting on
a wooden chair. Need
to keep practicing before
even coming close to
the proficiency of that
spindly crooked spruce
over there.
When It Looks Like the End
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cherry tree, growth, inspiration, mortality, stumpy, tree on April 1, 2024| 11 Comments »
for Stumpy, and maybe for you
To survive. To not only survive,
but to bring joy. To bloom despite
our own hollowing.
To bloom despite the erosion
of the world in which we grew.
I speak of a cherry tree, but
I also, perhaps, speak of you—
how you have made of your life
not just a stump, but a story.
How in hostile conditions,
despite brackish odds,
you’ve found the drive to grow.
How your words and your actions,
like cuttings, might take on a life
of their own—a legacy
of resilience that finds a home
in the soil of the lives still here.
In this way, you continue
to flourish and be known.
In this way you are not here
and ever here. Gone
and never gone. In this way
one life is a blossom that disappears
and returns on a branch not its own.
None of us live forever.
Still the chance to give the best of ourselves
away. This is how we go on.
for more information about Stumpy, the beloved cherry tree, visit here
Holding Your Heart
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, heart, love, touch, tree on August 29, 2023| 7 Comments »
I want to trace the rings of your heart
the way I would trace tree rings—
not to count them
but to honor each season of you.
I want to touch my fingertips
to your scars, want to learn
your heart’s stories, find clues
of how you became who you are.
I want to press my palms
to your heart and praise
how it is we grow,
even in disaster, even in drought,
want to praise the dark center,
the time-thick bark, the record
of the ordinary days. I want
to chart the thin slivers of your wounds
and let my hands speak love,
want to tell you in a language
of quiet touch, I see you.
Aspen at Heart
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aspen, community, tree on May 29, 2023| 6 Comments »
How would it be
to live like the aspen,
to know the self
as one expression
of a glorious, radiant whole,
to live in communion
instead of competition,
to be the first to come in
where damage has been done—
and oh, so much damage
has been done.
I, too, want to grow even in winter,
in cold and naked times
when growth feels impossible,
want to be at once
both soft and strong.
I, too, want to be fueled by light
so I might offer shelter
for the rest of the world.
At Five
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged communion, connection, self, showing up, tree, younger self on July 19, 2022| 3 Comments »
Along the lake and down the hill,
the road dead ended into a meadow
with a wooden fence a girl could slip through,
and slip through she did,
that five-year-old version of me,
slipped through the gaps into the tall green grass
and then wandered to the lake
where the weeping willow hung over the shoreline
and she could sit beneath its shade and disappear—
or perhaps more rightly, she could show up.
As herself. Show up not as a girl who lived up the road
but as shade, as shore, as tree,
as field, as green beyond the fence.
Perhaps it only happened once or twice,
that journey past the dead end,
but forty-seven years later, I remember
the dissolution, how beneath that tree
I was no longer who I was, only more so.
How I knew myself as integral to the miracle.
There were whole decades I forgot her,
that infinite version of me.
Tonight I can tell she never left.
How did she ever fit in my limited sense of self?
What does she have to teach me now
of fences, of shadows,
of sitting quietly,
of the art of slipping through?
On My Daughter’s Fourteenth Birthday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, daughter, healing, thriving, tree, wound on July 15, 2022| 10 Comments »
Though she has been shaped
by pain, she thrives.
She is like a tree, now,
that remembers its wounds
and grows differently
because of its injuries,
some of them deep,
yet is no less vigorous
as it grows new healthy wood,
as it reaches for sun,
as it grounds into the soil,
as it offers its fruit
to the world.
The Poet Reads for the First Time Since Her Son Died
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, cinema, performance, self discovery, tree on January 25, 2022| 16 Comments »
with a line from Charles Simic, “The Prodigal”
Glade of light on the empty stage.
She steps into it, eyes blinded.
Someone in the audience
clears a throat. Someone
scuffs a sole. Many invisible
someones make no sound at all.
She has faith they are there.
She is holding a stack of papers.
Her chest contracts, rises.
So much that happens goes unseen,
a secret cinema.
She opens her mouth
and the words fall out like leaves
releasing themselves from a tree.
With each sentence she is more bare
until only her trunk remains.
She is an aspen arriving in January,
skeleton exposed.
What no one can see
are the roots. What no one can see
is she is standing on trust.
It has taken her fifty-two years
of bursting into color and
wildly waving her branches
to finally learn how
to stand still.
The other trees stand with her,
and though it is winter,
their roots grow wider, deeper.
Now Everlasting
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cottonwood, forever, now, summer, tree on June 12, 2021| 2 Comments »
The cotton is starting to fall from the trees
and already handfuls of white cover the ground.
Every year, it happens, this mid-summer snow,
and sitting here, I seem to exist in a now
that includes every summer—a now
of goose honk and bright pulse of cricket song,
deep green fields and whitewater.
I feel utterly tethered to the moment
and startlingly eternal—daughter
of blue sky and swallow flight, red cliff
and low golden light. What is forever
to the cottonwood trees if not now,
this very now when the tiny green seeds
are given fluffy white froth to travel on.
What is forever if not for this moment
of summer when I forget
whatever else I should be doing
and give myself up to scent of chokecherry,
prickle of grass, the unpredictable breeze.
Scale
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bonsai, evergreen, heart, scale, tree on January 8, 2021| 5 Comments »
The heart
is perhaps
more bonsai
than redwood—
constrained
by the size
of its container—
still, it branches,
it grows,
learns to thrive
inside,
no less
remarkable,
no less
evergreen.
On Discovering I’ve Grown
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beaver, growth, personal growth, tree on December 15, 2020| 2 Comments »
It’s not forever.
When we fence a tree
down by the river,
some slender tree
that a beaver could easily
gnaw through, the fence
only stays up until the trunk
grows big and thick,
wide enough to discourage
any who would try take it down.
Just today, I realized I’d built a fence
around me. Noticed it
only because, while routinely
clearing out,
I dismantled the fence
and took it away.
How invisible a wall can be.
What amazed me:
how enormous I’ve become—
vigorous, robust,
sturdy enough not to worry
about little bites.
I remember how, not so long ago,
I was so vulnerable.
You could hug me now,
now that the fence is gone,
though your arms wouldn’t quite reach
all the way around.
Perhaps that’s as it should be.
Part of me belongs to you.
Part of me is still growing
into the world.
From the Cottonwood
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, cottonwood, learning, tree on August 16, 2020| 4 Comments »
I want to hear the song in the old cottonwood tree
outside my window, the tired xylem, the weary phloem,
the rough hymn of the ancient bark. I want to know
how, despite fatigue, it continues to flourish,
to push new cells through the tips of the twigs,
how it thickens despite long drought.
I want to hear the dark lullaby of the worms
as they move through the loyal roots—
what do they know of persistence?
And the dappld shadow that continues to grow,
what might it teach me of love?
Let me be the student of the limbs
that broke off in the wind. Let me listen
and listen again. There is too much
I think I know. I’ve been singing the same
familiar songs so long I began to believe
they were gospel. Oh, how I’ve loved the psalms of green.
Let me sing them while they last. And then, may I learn
to love the song of emptiness, song of surrender,
song of whatever comes next.
Learning
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, learning, life, shadow, tree on July 26, 2020| 2 Comments »
Today the shadows
teach me to love
what is dim,
the sweet respite
of obscurity
when the sun
is too much
and a tree
yields its shape
so that I might slip
my clumsy heat
out of the bounds
of the vertical world
and find instead
a cool dark pool
on the ground,
as if I’m a boat
that has discovered
at last
a slim calm eddy
in which I might rest.
This is perhaps
the way we start
to meet our deaths—
sliding into the relief
of these dark, quiet
channels.