by david p. miller
Not to get all everything-is-everything about this,
but the same simplest stroll, along the same
paved path in the park three blocks away,
duff-piled or springing with damp green,
on the gravesite of homes where the neighborhood,
gone, gossiped and ate seventy years ago, this walk
eases my eyeballs in their sockets.
You’re right.
A long sentence, it was, getting to that,
because all of the above is true and inseparable.
History, sensation, the cheerful mundane
force themselves to the front at the same time,
linked with commas like elbows, in the park,
like roots and mycelium yoked underground.
Tree. As in maple, catalpa, birch, evodia, two locusts,
maybe a second evodia, flittering, undulated,
shadow-shifted, stuffing our postage-stamp house lot.
Not to mention our hollow log from a storybook.
A plague of grackles swarming evodia berries,
five raccoons head downwards from the hole
in the catalpa, across to the neighbors’ trampoline.
You ask, neighbors with a trampoline? Yes,
and raccoons tracing tree bark to jump mat.
As in the minds of trees, and what is a mind,
are they minds, I need to believe the lives
of their minds beneath my feet, their
underneath communication. Need to believe
in something so radically benign it cannot
be human.
The Bodhisattva Vow, imagine,
arose from trees and fungi. Sentient beings,
numberless: I pledge to save them. Another walk,
sprung steps, loose limbs, a thousand leaves
waving their palms before my optical nerves.
Even here, where, as the old maps force to mind,
it’s a shining autumn day atop our city’s wreckage
of memory. Also atop hyphae threads married
with the roots that feed the branches’ line drawings,
leaves drinking carbon I must expel.
David P. Miller’s collections include Bend in the Stair (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021) and Sprawled Asleep (Nixes Mate Books, 2019). His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Reed Magazine, LEON Literary Review, Solstice, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, Kestrel, and Vincent Brothers Review, among other journals.