Diorama 1871 (fragments addressing a great thing)

Anything smaller than 200 year-old white pines
will no longer concern us.

When you return to the forest, we will be strung on your back.
We will be as blind to one another as arrows in a quiver.

When we form a pile,
we will form a pile that makes you bigger.

-

Our houses were supposed to be words on the dry tongue of the land.
We didn’t consider what the words might be.
We didn’t consider that for you to pronounce them
they would have to catch fire.

-

When one of us moves her hand to brush a wasp away,
she is worse than the wasp,
spelling out messages to you she doesn’t understand.

-

When the bones and purple flowers
outnumbered us the following spring,
we realized our mistake. That’s when
we first spotted you, forming a row
of dark arches between the trees.

-

The swelling in our faces went down eventually. We couldn’t always hear,
but we could feel you buzzing. That’s when we decided
what kind of insect we should become.
No matter what one uses as the stinger,
feigned innocence is always the best venom.

-

We learned the hard way that the pines we cut down
had been holding time in place.
We didn’t know we were doing anything wrong,
sitting together at the rough wooden tables we’d made
and hauled out under the sun.

It was so easy to make the cuts
that we deemed everything we touched a type of wood
and everything we could do to it
a type of table.

We became large
by holding up our skirts, walking into the water, locking eyes,
feeling the exact same thing.

We will have to work harder to phrase what we say to you
as a prayer, though we all know that you are no god
and we are not believers.