I notice trees along the highway and beyond, tempted as I drive to ponder each design, to estimate its weight in life’s green scheme,
but each lone specimen evades me as I speed toward unknown peripheries of darker and darker groves and forests and jungles, implicating blackness in the blur of green until, impatiently, I change the station and just watch the road.
It’s a short cut and nothing but. It’s nothing but a short cut.
In the tangled humps of exposed roots I walk among in preference to the flat meander of concrete sidewalks, no subtle clues of something to do with souls impress me now, no metaphoric mazes come to mind to puzzle me with riddles of the meaning of roots, nor do ideas or images or intimations of immortality surprise me with the force of things unknown or new.
I walk among the tangled roots only because the way is straight and short.
It’s just a short cut and nothing but. It's nothing but a short cut.