Looking quietly at the sheet of paper,
holding his gaze on its clear brightness,
he saw the tree, its leaves and branches,
the earth below it and feeling fingers
of its roots, the soil—brown remains
of other fallen things, once living—
covered by weedy grasses, strewn
detritus of branches. And then he saw
the mill, its workers at the screaming saws,
the gathering of flesh and bark, the pulp
taken to the smoke-stacked temple, where men
and women worked their transubstantiations
in steaming rooms, taking breaks
to smoke and talk, as the tree’s silkening
progressed—the watery brew, the pressing,
the drying—the paper finally streaming
from the rolling bars in sheets that,
cut and boxed, were forklifted into trucks,
and, this particular sheet driven by a young
man, whose wife was pregnant, whose father
was dying, and so he half-listened to the radio
while thinking of arrivals and departures,
the sheet coming finally to the seer’s
hand, who says that compassion comes
from simply knowing what is happening.
And then he strikes a match, lights
a corner of the one, particular sheet
of paper, which traveled its very own path,
and watches it disappear in smoke.
.
Daniel Thomas
.