The Paper Maple

I have lately been wondering what it would be like 

to become a tree. 

To seep into the bark like so much sap and to cling to the woody pulp

until my very cells dissolve from circles into squares, so much stronger

than this fragile thing called body. 

To reach out to the four winds and to bear witness to the stars 

as they pass and turn and fall to the earth at my feet, 

brilliant and ebbing like so many past lives. 

To live a lifetime in the span of a year,

the birth and the blooming and the youth and the waning and the death

which rattles the bones and breaks the more fragile. 

To feel the sinking of roots deep into the damp earth and the stretching

of the self under the sun, snatching wayward balloons tossed

from the hands of careless children. 

To feel the squirrels and birds nest in the highest reaches of my hair 

and see the cats prowl below around my ankles, slow and seductive,

watching the drama of survival unfazed by modernity.

To have names carved upon my trunk, misshapen and misguided and

somehow lovely, so much like 

the human I once was.