Wet Poem by Stephen Bennett The Playjurist

Any woman who has known merely tenderness
is like the ranger in a national forest, looking after
the erosion of the soil and the growth of the trees.
And in the magic of it she guides people close
to its powers, but always protects them
from the giant beasts whose hugs are so strong
or the dangerous falls from which none can return.
She firmly resists the visitors straight linear urge, directing
it toward the pre-explored safely laid turns...
winding long in and out sensuously made paths,
which dive into the deepest ground growth
down through the lush green and bottomless gorges.
and burst out to the breath taking edge of pure endlessness.
And during her time there a sense of the place
grows inside her, the warm nourishment, which swells
through all the veins of everywhere, the generous weather's
caresses across quivering leaves, the hair of her head top
and the skin of her face. The occasional storm
taking over the place doesn't touch her so much
as it touches the tops of her trees.
She has learned to climb up into them
every time she hears thunder and feels the wind.
Straddling her branch mate and feeling it rock, she
watches its hundreds of out stretched ends draw long
lazy arcs through the rush of the pushing and growing song
of the air, and she has eventually come to always return
to her rocking place and holds on anytime she hears wind,
until one day a flash of it knocks her off the top, and her body
then surrounded by sky as it's falling... suddenly
becomes the whole earth.