No one knows how oak arrived
into Germanic tongues,
the several flavors all

local variations
of a root oak.

Tree, by contrast, originates
in mist-receding words
for living things that

currently answer to oak.
Or say again:

oaks came to be called
trees, but the mystery of
oak itself remains. Strange

to me, how simplicity
complicates itself, turning

up in a bow; a bough.
Treen, for instance,
even now

never made it out of
Middle English, and yet,

what of it?
I’ll call a living brown
and green tree

treen, without witnesses.
You could, too,

pick nits on nights with me
out of our differences—
like between savage

and salvation, is there
a gulf? A salve age

or a chastening?
While forks
and knots are

said to be opposites,
the split doesn’t change

backwards: looking
away from the motion,
into the groove.

Backwards,
a thing fits better,

but all the trend lines
would take a god to read.
A human to give up on.

Some kind of suppleness in old and modern
Dutch, and modest as a soft touch
from fingers that have asked: what is there
to lose? And been answered by: what there is
to lose. After being somber and cross,

loss tries acceptance. The stage of grief
you can move inside. The highrise of humility
from humus; the rise of dust from earth,
given water, and beheld with a tremble of might
not have been. Might not have been,

but was. At root, meek was
muck by another route from the same
source: Eden, as it happened, the literal
sense of which was watered earth.
Hard to believe any of this, if philologists

weren’t, as a rule, a trustworthy tribe,
voting with their cellar full of knowledge
the earth keeps from us and the earth
keeps for us. While the meek makeshift
to outlast the latest last and final act

of the latest first and foremost voice,
first and foremost void of any purpose
not his own. And I a trying-to-be-gentle man
mention this, mentioning all that there will be
of my inheritance. In the muddle of every: where

the meek prepare for a longer haul, right
there, in the muddle of things. In the marl
where mud and pebble mix, gravel at home
in its gravity — and open — to whatever rains
down and through, or clean as seedlings, up.