The Tree You come to love me too late. Me, with my green fingers and sunken feet, I have been found once and enough in my row of neighbors, and am no longer a suitable host for posting coming events. The surveyors have pronounced me grown, prizing more my shadow than the breadth of final potential. Only you still measure my circumference with expectation as if there are fruit-seeds yet to catch and sow. You tap into my skin with your open-mouthed spiggot, finding in wrinkled bark more than the armor of history, pulling up the liquor of my roots. You penetrate the boundary of my proper sense. My green green fingers are so many now so veined and many but the whisper of your presence is like a foreign tongue, learned but never used. And I am planted against movement. I do not know what you mean by run and free and come away. Think instead of a place to rest and gather yourself. Of paneling and desks and wood grain floors. Of paper and kindling and ways to use me up. But for love, you come too late.