a love portrait of the old trees

the pressed flowers in your hands fall on the ground where you swallow fair weather, the same ground where you listen to the graves of strangers tell you what it means to decompose, to let the trees become the flesh of you so flowers may grow and tears may fly from the lashes of children.

they fall, fall from trees to crushed flowers and laugh like earth through the crunch of years, petal after petal, until, wet and thorny and dry, they fall back into the earth in that long stretch, through airs of time, from the branches to the roots.

the graves tell you this. the graves tell you that stones don't tell their stories as sweet as the trees that whisper their names and speak sweet of their lives in spring, trees that mourn their deaths and grow quiet and black and bold in winter.

the world listens as you listen, and laughs ring and reverberate through the roots. branches are blankets and you fall asleep to the lungs of leaves and the tongues of grass. and you think that the world laughs in languages of colored flowers and birds, and screams in hawks and twigs and thorns and flaming bushes, and sleeps in the drooping black eyes of deer and silky lilies and winding veins.

the pressed flowers in your hands sing of romantics and hands once pressed against hands, against petals and stems of dewy flesh. oh gone, the imprint of touch still fingers the veins of stems and pulls in the scent of dead petals. ancient laughs and screams and sleep are etched there in remnants and runes.

the winter listens to your breath, etching your name into unborn leaves.