On a trail in the Oregon woods
breath tastes like old skin.
Lichens I scrape from a sponged log
scab the back of my soon-to-be future hand,
the siskin’s sweet eats a eulogy
for the fallen. When we hug a spruce
six centuries thick, moss threads
our fingers with ringlets green as time
while our free hands, a strained reach,
embrace a girth of twenty missing arms.
If resin is the smoke of our breaths
a blue-tailed skink climbs faster than thought.
Here, whatever it was escapes us.
The trunk trembles like a yawn of iron.
Unseen yet felt, the crown scrapes
a sky of pre-Columbian stars.
