I tell the story of the trees.
Stout broadleaves and tall evergreens
who guard the portals to the Watershed.
My muse is the Green Spirit, the force
that drives the seed, flower, and fruit
through the green fuse.

                                        Begin, Muse,
on that nameless Pacific coast.
Imagine that dark progenitor the Sea,
the white breakers washing up amnion
of living matter onto the swarsh wastes.

The midwifing shore fills organa
into the cradling scarp: wood, weed
and kelp, and the numberless unborn,
stranding dark materials on the strand.

On the banks the first salty offspring,
the dune grasses and hardy verbena,
the morning glory and yellow iceplant,
shuffle up the sand like a pilgrimage.

On the bald bluffs, the lupin and sage
lay like sleepy hamlets before the gates.
High on cliffs, the spruce and cypress
stand as bulwarks against the spray.

Imagine Fog rising like flue-gas
out of the vaporous furnace of the Sea.
Roiling titan, the Fog born of the Sea,
runs his fingers through the green tufts
of trees. He grips the aprons of mountains
and clutches terraces. On hands and knees
he summits heroically the coastal range
and reaches with hands outstretched
to pilfer the pearl Moon, to steal the jewel
dawn locks away in its vault of blue.
And each morning the Sun’s golden doors
thrown open burns the Fog away
in pillars of steam white and broken.

The gods of Nature—Sun, Fog, and Sea,
and the Green Spirit, too—fashion
with their art the mighty will of trees.

Green their souls, and Green their deity.
Sylvia, the Green Spirit, Her Verdancy,
enlivens and alters their green figura,
a forest mask worn by faceless rock.
Herself the god of growth and regrowth.
Summer to Autumn, Winter to Spring.
Season, year and century. What returns
to itself, what becomes itself once more.
Green the life that lives again and again…

Our story in that foggy Watershed begins
after the Mother Trees have gone, long,
long after their reigns, having ended,
broke the ancient bonds of the wide Basin
and left the unified woods fragmented.

Mother Trees, who once brought plants together
by the roots, forged cities underground
diverse in alliance, rich in commerce—
who governed by their reaching influence
and brought the lands together as one wood—
vanished by the will of a single tree,
but by the will of another grew again.

Begin in that umbrageous grove of Middle Hill.
There are spirits at work in the undergrowth.
The floor scintillates with checkered light 
that dazzles like the shallow of a seabed soaked
in the midday Sun. Green the floor and downy
with leaf litter and greased with the black rot
of humus. Columns of bark float in the fog
and vanish in the narrowing distance.
The furrows of their trunks are tufted with spike moss
and lichen, their basal mounds are flourished
with feathery plumes of sword fern and bracken
and capes of sorrel that trail on the floor.
A new redwood with its hardy shoot breaks
the seal of the compacted soil open
and is reborn.

                          Begin with that small tree.
Awakened by the light that first unfurled
the tender plumule, the first seed leaves
flapping their wings as the shoot straightens.
And as a seedling the first arms waving
their cotyledons, unpeeling from the shoot,
virgin green before the first season’s wood. 

In time the tree, whom the woods call
Orus the redwood, will stand as tall as clouds
and become the Mother Tree of all the Hill.
And brandished like the Green Spirit’s flag
raising its woody arm straight from the Earth
will flash its beacon for plants in the Watershed,
flashing with hope of a prosperous age to come
when the whole Basin flourishes in green
as the Great Sun, wheeling, shines above.