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>> The next poem comes from having
looked at a leaf too long, maybe.

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You - If you take one leaf and you hold it
up by the stalk, you begin to notice

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that it's a kind of miniature
tree because it also has a trunk.

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It also has the branches that extend down.

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I got to thinking about it and this
is the poem that came out of it.

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It's one called Roots.

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All her life, she has looked at leaves
as though they were the whole tree.

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All there was.

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Looked down the veins as though
they stopped at some stem heart.

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Looked at the stalk as though it
were a foot, a leg, all it stood on.

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Followed, followed up the branches of
blood, thinking she traced back bone,

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spine, something that could bear alone.

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And what was the tree?

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The tree, only a case, only a
stand, a mount, a launch, a lift.

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What she wanted to deny, that the heart
was underground, mythic, unchallengeable.

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But all the roots went back
to that real foot underground,

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rising toward the trunk,
which was the truest spine.

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That the leaf was not even an arm, not
even hand, only a finger [inaudible].

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It is let go.

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She is let go.