This is the only world like this, you know.
There’s no other Earth, no matter how far you go.
And we get to live in it, for this flicker of a lifetime,
and then to carry it with us past time itself.
I walked on the raised pathway through the oak grove
listening to a near-deafening chorus of frog song,
so varied in pitch and rhythm as it glided through the trees,
whose feet the rains had come to wash for spring.
Think of the energy they must summon to pull their thick sap
all the way from their roots up to the tips that touch the sky
and to make leaves and acorns from nothing but that and light.
They deserve this drenching and this clamorous serenade.
Only this one, this Earth. I let the sight of these oaks,
well over their ankles in water, soak into my being. I dissolve
in the scene and wear its smell. I taste the cool of it.
I will remember you, I say to it as I leave. I will remember.
