>> The next poem comes from having looked at a leaf too long, maybe.
You - If you take one leaf and you hold it up by the stalk, you begin to notice
that it's a kind of miniature tree because it also has a trunk.
It also has the branches that extend down.
I got to thinking about it and this is the poem that came out of it.
It's one called Roots.
All her life, she has looked at leaves as though they were the whole tree.
All there was.
Looked down the veins as though they stopped at some stem heart.
Looked at the stalk as though it were a foot, a leg, all it stood on.
Followed, followed up the branches of blood, thinking she traced back bone,
spine, something that could bear alone.
And what was the tree?
The tree, only a case, only a stand, a mount, a launch, a lift.
What she wanted to deny, that the heart was underground, mythic, unchallengeable.
But all the roots went back to that real foot underground,
rising toward the trunk, which was the truest spine.
That the leaf was not even an arm, not even hand, only a finger [inaudible].
It is let go.
She is let go.