Dirt Pumps

I live in a house in the woods. The monumental oaks and poplars tower more than sixty feet above the roof of my split-level house. The maples and dogwoods stare maternally in my windows at night.

Each autumn literally tons of leaves drift deliberately to the ground. They lie there.

The top layers protect and mulch the Earth throughout the year, keeping the ground moist and filling the air with the scent of second grade. The lower layers are worm food and beetle fodder as these alchemists make good on their accord.

I try ineffectually to find time to rake the leaves from my small patch of shaded lawn and use them to cover the yawning vegetable garden like a bequeathed quilt.

The next year, leaves fall again, covering the defiant that refused to obey the former mandate of entropy. The rebels are smothered in the love of their brothers. Seizures of rain compel life from cloud to ground.

Descending the mulch, we visit the past.

Years before my family lived here, the family with the two boy scouts raked the leaves from the same trees. They are here below, with minerals and rocks and things that conventional science refutes, integrated and infused with excrement and the bodies of buried pets.

There are forces here. These things exist, and from the perspective of the verb "to be", may be viewed as be-ings.

The roots reach nearly as deep into the Earth as the branches reach into the Heavens. The web of fine arteries and their symbiotic fungi drink from the subterrestrial fountain, taking in the mineral nutrients, and pagan forces, and Boy Scout convictions.

A capillary, scarcely bigger than the molecules it consumes, dutifully conveys the serum to its parent node, which accepts it manifestly.

The liquid makes its ambitious odyssey up the tree, traversing from one node to the next, each getting larger, wider, more detectable and clear. Drawn by a genial force, taboo and heathen, yet greater than the myopia of man's mechanical sun. More and more nutrient distills until the hydraulic power of a single tree silently rivals humanity's most creative and coarse contrivance.

The affusion ministers the sunken treasures to the host, and emerges chaste on its leaves in a baptism of indoctrination.

And finally, as the water makes cloud, and the oxygen makes alms, the leaf withers and wilts and returns to the Earth pious and appeased.