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Echoes within echoes

I am combing through the dead and dying 

of your plants 

you haven't been here for months

and still your touch remains

Hardened through neglect

In abandonment

...but I understand.

I sense your style in selection

Succulent and ornamental

Colorful, durable, spoiled

And I know where you learned it—

And I sense the echoes of instruction through time

And I remember us

And I sense the echoes of a time

When a different forest grew in this place

Outside the tree I planted has become so immense

I remember when I could barely hold it with both hands

As we put it into the earth, so many years ago  

And they topped it.

Careless like the humans are

And I smile as it breaks the concrete

nothing this place has done to our lives

Can stop the inertia of what has been put in motion

I hope that tree grows to destroy this city.

I hope it stands for a thousand years

like a monument to some kind of love 

I don't entirely know what the takeaway is

but I know that

because of you; I can see. 

and I hope that everywhere your life leads

the door to the forest remains open 

I go back to watering them

And I see what you mean: 

they are indeed special.

relieved in 

In the reliefs 

where the reverberations of memory

Are made real

In the echoes of a love that was beyond this place