In the woods I was

called to waken. It was April. I was nine.
On our knees beneath the bare-branched arch of trees,
my mother brushed aside dried leaves, showed me

delicate and erect, a trillium —
the intense fragility of its tip had broken”the membrane of earth before opening to red.

Look, she said: A ring of threes! I looked. She looked.
It looked. Three petals, three sepals, three
leaves a trinity of trinities one spirit rising.

from dirt into the tremble of bloom.
We turned, crawled
through the comproting sound of leaves

decaying. My mother stopped, touched
my knee. My knee began to root. Look, she said,
showed me a jack-in-the-pulpit: A little minister

in a plant — as she tenderly lifted
the hooded sheath, exposing the slender cone.
A seed inside me split open.

My mother lowered the vestibule roof — our heads
were already bowed: silence grea
petals in my ears. Nearer to the ground than heaven,

God began to stir —
sap rose like honey in my veins
slender tendrils from my spine began to spiral