Epistemology

Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.
Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.
Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord 
to keep it from fraying?
Not the man who called my life a debacle, 
a word whose sound I love.
In a debacle things are unleashed.
Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.
I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate, 
the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing. 
They don’t use words, but they can be said to love. 
They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree.
And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing
stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect 
or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare, 
to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.
Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth
and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.
 
Credit

Copyright © 2017 by Catherine Barnett. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 16, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem
“Once I dragged a lectern out to a field and wrote there, facing the trees, and felt at a wonderful loss for words. What could I say to trees that might matter? Nothing but praise. Trees pay no attention to fences. And walking along West 97th Street I marvel at how the honey locust grows right beautifully through the chainlink and into the schoolyard here. (If you’re in love with trees, take a look at Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees.) Lines 14 to 16 borrow definitions from various dictionaries etymological and otherwise.”
—Catherine Barnett