Resurrection

What first drew me to you? I think it was your pale, creamy green flesh, perhaps once white, when you stood upright, stretching toward the sky. An aspen? No, too far north we are. Some kind of birch? Or is it a trick, the trick of the lichen that now flourishes on your skin as you lie on the tender blanket of earth that once covered you in your infancy?

I bend to take hold of your jagged end, softened by mosses, and pull; a piece of you comes away in my hand. With a muted crack, swollen fibers yield. A mere twelve inches in length, you are an entire landscape of a different world. 

A world of sphagnum forests bordering smooth verdant meadows that, as I run my finger across them, betray the damp of rotting wood. And at one end, darker moss grows tundra-like, home to fungi the size of pin-heads. No wild animals graze here, but microscopic herds, invisible to the naked eye, move across your surface and feast on the riches of your decomposing body. 

You are a world unto yourself and, at the same time, a dying fragment of another one. The miracle - for that is what it is - of death’s seemingly limitless capacity to not only yield to the burgeoning life that presses on it from behind, but to become its host. To feed and nurture it. You are so exquisitely beautiful in your decay. 

You are still tree. And you are more. You are raft, you are banquet, you are mother. You have never been more alive, more vibrant, more fertile than you are in this moment of breaking down and returning. 

What, I wonder, might my aging and failing, my faltering and mortal dying look like, were I to offer my very self to what might be born and nourished as I fall from full upright to recline and eventually rest upon the ground?