Late Summer, Last Light
Silence. The trees, not strictly immobile,
but almost so. Movement so slight
only they themselves
have a feel for it.
***
The maple knows I have come
here at the edge of trees
to practice my green death.
Which has nothing to do
with dying. Which has everything
to do with how little I know
about my own impending
non-life—this practice of stillness
being my trial run at tree-breathing.
Right now, as I tell this, I rehearse
a maple-breath let out
and out and out without ever
pulling it back in.
***
The cedar can stand still the way
a corpse lies unmoving.
But cedar-stillness is not
a lack of life,
is not even a sleep.
The cedar’s stillness
isn’t. I practice
its motionless soundless
breathing. What I would—
any other day—exhale,
I breathe in. Then breathe out
what my lungs profess
to crave.
***
I mimic the hundred-foot queen fir,
her inch-by-inch living—
that imperceptible candling
at her bough-tips,
her cones ripening
at their ancient amber rate.
Existence so slow
my loved ones believe
I’m not alive at all.
How little my family knows
of the mouth in each
resin-pore of my body—
countless small sister-tongues
licking the air.
PAULANN PETERSEN, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, has eight full-length books of poetry, her most recent being My Kindred from Salmon Poetry of Ireland. Read more.