Understory

The forest floor keeps its own accounts— leaf by leaf, a ledger of what fell and what was gathered back.

Beneath the mulch, white threads stitch one root to another, passing sugar in the dark like whispered rumors of the sun.

A beetle navigates the galleries of a rotting log, its body a lantern no one lit. The wood gives way to something softer than wood, something that remembers being tree.

After rain, the understory breathes— steam lifting from the duff as if the ground were dreaming out loud, its slow exhale rising through the canopy to join what it once was.