by Greg Lowenberg, from the chapbook Refuge:

Cousins

I take shelter from a raging sun
under twin oaks guarding a field’s margin,
one black, one white.
I come face to face with leafy soul skins,
soft-lobed and sword-tipped flesh,
equally bit, freckled, pied, bulbous, mined, and bruised.
Cousins really,
intertwined branches propped against a summer wind,
anastomosing rootlets embracing in the soil below.

I am eye to eye with invisible cynipids.
Amphibolips is growing mysterious puff-ball apples, yes apples.
And the other wasp, Neuroterus, busily forming tiny seed bumps
across each leaf’s underside.
Cousins really,
who silently consume oak flesh,
only their feeding stations not hidden from view.

I with I, it seems there are two of me.
One who wants to stay safely among oaks and wasps,
to admire and adore;
the other who must leave here to search for new cousins, to venture
to explore.

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