The trees ripple lightly with the wind, glittery like moonlit ocean water. The birds sing from their momentary, fleeting, soon-before-flying places. Bouncing between branches, resting on new limbs each time, trying carefully and heartily to share their song. Hiiiiiiii trees, they trill. Can you hold my song for me, take it in through your leaves, let it wrap gently around your trunk and then release it to the wind to carry a long way away? Let it find my fellow singers as my calls are enveloped by the strong whooshings of wind.

Before the trees can respond to the birds, their leaves begin to rustle, slowly first as the incoming wind begins to dance through the grove, baying. The wind ripples from across the bay, curls, dives, twists, with the excitement of the weather to share. Froooooom San Franciscoooooo, it calls, howling straight into the tall stand of eucalyptus. Its hurling momentum is broken by the thick, dark huddle of the tall tree crowns.

Through the trunks, branches, and leaves, the shapes of the words become riffles. The trees begin ringing with words of the wind. I have some wooooords from your friends in the wessssst, the ooooones which watch oooover the big blue waters and listen to their tumbling ripplessss and sssshiny shimmersssss. They told them, telling me whoooo brings to yooou, ssssoooongssss about the sssun weeee ssseeeeee, peeking, burssssting, and sssstretching over the treeeeesss and the sssseaaaaaa after the loooong rainssss. 

The birds, having left their nests to listen to the rustling of the wind, start to swim through the air, dipping and diving with excitement of this long-awaited sentiment. These words, they call, scream, shrill, sing, carry words about today, which is finally clear and hollow enough for our big song. The clouds lightened last night. They released, dumped, expelled, unfolded water in big blankets from the buckets, the stores, or, pores, of the sky. For so long it seemed dark and heavy with the wondrous weight of water. These songs, coming fast from far over the bay, whirling in their way, invite us to dance, twist and turn into the clear morning.

And so I watch as the trunks of the eucalyptus trees slowly sway and move back and forth with dance. In their movement they say, turning, I’m turning! Twist twist twist to the top, I dance, I’m a ballerina. The branches wander and bend with the curling up-and-down swirling of the wind, some of them even tragically break and fall straight down, exhausted of dance, to the floor. At the end, the last remnants are the carrying, withstanding and strong sing-song of the birds, and last life of leaves, caught in the turning of the wind as it scoops them from the forest floor of rest. They spin once or twice again up with the currents, until finally settling and waiting to break and turn into the ground, where they can start to listen to the songs of the soil.