Forest

I found I was a ghost town

Filled with spirits of some who'd been before

Landscape pitted with the robbery

Of mustachioed men

Whose faces stayed off posters

Newsprint autobituaries halo them.

I found I was a ghost town

Indentured voices echoing in empty streets

Incrementally beggared:

Pine to prairie to mine to desert

And left to tumbleweeds,

Never still, yearning for life.

I found I was a ghost town and I

Lined the slapped-up clapboard with dynamite

Laid and lit the fuses, danced in explosive catharsis

Vira de cura, returning to the wild.

How strange--the railway people who'd shamed my barren mercantile

Rail at my destroying the façade,

Insisting I build back that abandoned Town & Co.

I will not have it

My bent is all toward trees,

Limbs lifted as I tap roots through earth,

Twisting with the naked joy of turning

Light to air, sweet'ning deep channels,

Channeling dryad secrets in

My greenling heart.

How it burns! power rising from that knot

Tying me together, my navel a cauldron Spilling smoke and spores and stars across my

Lichen-laced, spell-simple, soul

All capped in blue.