Through the Soil   The problem is the prison of our words — if we call it talk, that thing that trees do through their roots, we render the thought absurd, we blind ourselves to a fresh kind of beauty. So call it something else, then — this chemical communication, this exchange of intricate knowledge, many Decembers and just as many Mays, all the strange ways of soil and sunlight.                                          Words are the pins that pierce the butterflies of what we mean, displaying them as lifeless at the instant that we speak. So how to say it — between the fluttering and the net, or the truth in the dirt, the message that must go through?     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont May 2021