Under the leaves where you’d be lying,
life makes woods of Tennessee
as leaves and loam grow down, drying
brown from chlorophyll and tree.
Needles that loosen, where you’d be,
range to the ground or graze down
the tunneled heights so quietly
they have not gathered. On the ground,
under the needles where earth would like you to break

and drown,

tunnels fill the earth like foam,
the sentried, calm land breaks down,
and fungi blacken into loam.
Would seas of insects wash those brown
and buttressed skies with catacombs?
Would leaves the trees gave up to spin
through the teeth of their waiting, branching comb
weave you back again? You would begin
to rot into those trees whose forest we have been,

where root hair cells would take you in,
where I’d thread through if I could break
out from the trees that forest in
my branch with leaves, where I would
make ground for the earth if I could,
take sounds of all your unheard trying
down with me to fall, and break,
ranging the tunnels that are only dying,
circling so slowly, circling them, and crying.

First collected in Eve (Story Line Press, 1997, Reprinted by Carnegie Mellon University Press Contemporary Classics Poetry Series, 2011).