At Ross Cliffs

At the foot
of a oak spar,
moss balls cover
the knees
of its exposed roots.

We don’t see this
in the city, often —
the soil won’t permit this,
not after years
of chemical insult from

household dumping
and heavy metal saturation.
Thin patches, perhaps,
but never these testicular
mounds, hairy with tan spore heads.

How is it possible
that with all these sheer stones
and surfaces, there’s no
graffiti at all?  That no one’s
tagged any of it as turf?

It’s not as if that urge to mark
doesn’t exist here:  even now
boys from a club from a local prep school
are cabled up and trust-falling
down the cliff,

carefully supervised
by their adviser, helmeted
and booted, voice and youth
roaring out of them as they
conquer their environment.

But it is still quiet here
in spite of them, quiet
in precisely the way
the city never is:
every sign or sound of us

sucked into a greater stillness
that will forget us as soon as we have gone back
to our poisons and our tribal wars.
The woods understand what can be possessed
and what cannot.

I stand at the edge.
I look straight out at the tops of trees
that have grown this tall from far below.
It is nothing to them if I fall or remain.
If I leap my blood will wash away

into the clean and potent soil
to nourish the balls of moss,
the upright oaks, the silence,
while the rocks will remain unchanged.
If I turn and walk away, it will be all the same.