not Poetry Thursday, extra, for the trees

Epistemology
 ~Catherine Barnett
 
Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.
Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.
Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord
to keep it from fraying?
Not the man who called my life a debacle,
a word whose sound I love.
In a debacle things are unleashed.
Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.
I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate,
the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing.
They don’t use words, but they can be said to love.
They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another
          tree.
And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing
stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect
or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare,
to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.
Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth
and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.

I have been watching the trees turn for the past few months. Every once in a while, I don't just admire from a far, but I collect. Sometimes I pick up perfect specimens and other times I pick by color or variation. Mostly I have been capturing in photo rather than collecting. But I had the idea that I would put them in my thanksgiving cards.

Some of them have now gotten so brittle, but I think I will include them anyway.

Why should leaves be perfect or retain their color or not get brittle?

I feel like there has a been a war against the leaves raging for the last week. Aggressive leaf collecting, herding, blowing. They don't rake. They ride lawn blowers. Leaf blowers. Leaf. Blowers. Seriously? 


I am lazy about yard work, it is true. But I also think if nature decided to blow the leaves off the trees that there might be a secret plan. I think the leaves should stay on the ground like a blanket. As the cold settles in, the leaves huddle together, covering the roots, keeping their trees safe.

That's what I think.

And, yes, I do name everything. Every. Thing. Every. Thing.