Sap

Bucket-bottoms up on stilts of seams,

where overlap takes twice as long to flake

off into the thick sponge of spring ground,

remind us this was done for sweetness’s sake

before we came and knew the trees or knew

the way to boil their fluids to sweet goo.

Was there a spring the buckets stayed attached,

perhaps like pails of blood, until they over

flowed, the spigots holding them went loose,

and trees spat them out as tired lovers

do when sore from interventions of the flesh?

What of the sapper? Was he not fresh,

renewed as frost evaporated from his earth

and fired up the workings of his trees?

They use the rising air as an excuse

to pull from dirt deep things that treat disease

and reconnect us with our human fate,

disguising all as syrup on a plate.

Our spring is no different from the rest

when we, like him, are headed for a ground

that makes us into sweetness in the dirt

tree-roots mine and keep us coming round

and round and dripping from a tap

a stranger will have drilled, looking for sap

to catch in brand-new buckets some spring day

like this and who can know how many more

before his covered buckets bend and rust

and he like us can gather sap no more

or pull the spouts or scrub out all the pails

and hoard sweet dirt beneath his fingernails?