Big Leaf Maples

April 26, 2023

I like the way the roots of these big leaf maple trees
muscle up through the ground like mountain ranges,
some of them with fern moss forests on their slopes.
I step over them like a god bestriding the earth.

But when I crane my neck to look up, I see I cannot see
their crowns, so high are they, and to them I must seem
a needlessly complicated creature, one who walks
and thinks and worries and sometimes stops to look.

And now the roots look like cresting waves or ripples
over creek rocks, and the path becomes a stream.
I’m walking upstream, seen by the unseen.

 

–from Dharma Talk; first published in The Westchester Review