Poem: We Count Them All in Rings

     We Count Them All in Rings

I am old growth; part of a woods, not a farm.
In the woods, the old are not cut down mid-life,
leaving flattened evidence of once a tree.
In the woods, there are no horizontal abbreviations of life
to stand on, and wonder how long it might have gone. 
We crowd out, aspiring, and if our days are many,
we spread out, reaching for each other.

In the woods, there are no stumps.
There are old trees, standing still, giving back
what they have used, until wind and weakness
take them down to earth; the fallen old.
Having reached for the light, finally we fall
to rest and make home for small things,
for the mossy things.  In the old woods
there are no stumps:  there are traces.

I am old growth, like the old growth I knew
when I was a boy, where the forest farmers
had not yet come to make stubble of the woods,
where the fallen old altered the way to go,
and where we followed where deer had gone,
where the woods allowed us to go.

We did not know the shape of the land
except where the old ones had fallen from the sky,
and where creeks ran low and away. 
The woods hid horizon, except sometimes
where the land dropped away as if it too had fallen;
older still than the woods we learned on foot.

On foot we learned the ways of time,
and walked among the older generations,
silent at what they had become before we came.
They circled the slow years about themselves,
ring by ring, until wind and weariness brought them down,
where they lay, in and under the moss, returning.

I am old wood, standing amid the older still,
and the younger yet, one of the generations of woods,
accepting the seasons that filter into the woods,
enjoying them for as long as they come, here
where we count them all in rings.