And the ghosts of giggling trees strangely still
corporeal their mossgrown huge if humble selves
shelved, their velvet birth and beauty marks
fading the color of a tired prepartum sky -
fractured and whole they lie, tongued and truncated
by the formlessness of flame

their crisscrossings gruesome tictactoes
on barren hills and plains where
a sad woman sat before a camp torching
a love-be-lost letter -- thousands of acres
felled by the folly of one singe'd heart.

What is a forest no longer gleeful, no longer
slaking itself on clouds' copious downpourings
or bathing in the sweet opaque milk of sleet or snow?
The fallen mouths of trees, their knotholes and shelters
that rose each year higher in the seesaw of daybreak –

the broken do not play, do not sway like children in the sun,
do not maintain or shake out their curls, but rather,
embarrassed, rear their useless roots, the great
on down to angelhair, spill their secrets in too much white
shadowing them - sentries that cackled and caved

they lie awake in moonlight dreamless,
paraplegics unable to reach sustenance
nor will they ever touch the thing that allows
one scorched soul to conduct a glorious green singing
into the requiem of charred submission.