Bulldozer Prints (2007)

I smell eternal life
in the thick black compost
grasped by roots enslaved to oak
birch, fir and beech

a sapling and I are the same age.
if I cut him down I can show you
each of his six rings
while his fingers claw soft ground.

I have no rings,
but i can leave.

There is magic in the seed
buried in the orange mud
that cool autumn day I was born.

My legs are not rooted.
I know stars, cool spring waters
and baptism

That is my sod.
where my roots are. In the spirit. In the water.
And I am young,
I don't know it yet.
I don't know it is beautiful when I see the place
where the sunlight lurches through the leaves of a hundred of his kin
and then waltzes the afternoons away, is the clearest view of the wound.
I don't know beautiful, but I know the strata of this earth,
and the way she bleeds from the blades of man's awesome might
as he makes way for easier access
to the glory he does not understand he's destroying.
Under the holy black sod that are the sapling's home,
where that humus turns to rocky clay.
I know that smell too.
I know the smell of rain, caressed --
Held -- long into the morning
until the sun calls her home.

Until small hands dig in search of something to mold into a dream.
revealing the larger stones
some filled with amethyst
and some only rosy quartz,
both lay naked in the sand.
And I know the smells, but I don't know
each grain.
and I don't know that every miniscule microbe and every pebble and every rock
is a hymn as loud as all the angels and archangels as they praise His name.
I don't know that this is a holy testament to the expanse of knowledge --
unknowable.
unknown.
and yet easily revealed in a juvenile fit of fancy,
before being
misunderstood, buried again, and forgotten
for years and years,
until the boy is dead and buried
in the heart of a man he never dreamed.