Blue Oak
A meadow ends where all the perpendiculars of a leafy brown
river throw themselves up towards blue. The fruits are olive
and ocher. Sprays of dark leaves shiver and splash with
sun. Lightning scars show where the main, once shaped
by flames, was not lost but reduced to fine fists, oak tissue
under sheets of earth, sleeping through the storm and
teeth of quick-heat. Here it is: the world utterly lovely
despite the anguish, despite endless battles. Meanwhile,
you have slipped away to yours. My phone is still again. I
could call back. I could babble about this testimony to
resilience, bent limbs and great elbows of trunk leaning against
granite in gestures of pondering and reconciliation. I
could share the looping and fluttering of flycatchers, grasses
fresh with fog-drip and shade, pressed flat where a fox
recently turned doglike circles round and round before
settling in. I could hold up my phone. among the workings of
xylem and phloem so you could hear the rustling, the liquid flow
scooping minutes out of the heart’s rocky sloping, terrain
and flowing on as only a river can. Or I could stand still and listen.
–Maya Khosla