The Happiness of Trees

I slept that summer on a screen porch in the woods

    with the creatures and insects singing so loudly

my mind seemed to join them—out there without me—

    to move around like a breeze from form to form

and then to return as a fox or a cicada,

    some other night creature, to slip back inside me

humming whatever it had heard, patterns

    I couldn’t sing along with but felt inside

like the happiness of trees when a soft wind

    turns their leaves’ pale underbellies up to the sky

and makes the sap rise. I loved to wake

    before myself, to silence and fog.

Sometimes I got up and walked out into the chilly woods

    and sometimes I turned over as though this happiness

might last forever, and slept just a while

    longer, until the first birds sang.

-- Michael Hettich