The Slacker Need Not Apologize
ACT I (oak to willow)
It's I, your gnarled accuser, here to scold. What REALLY do you know of earth and sky? Which different raindrops can you classify? How many kinds of dung identify? From too much staring at the shapes of winds, You're blinder than a stump to honest mold, Gall, mildew, all true tree-reality. Mad bird-cursed shaker of obstreperous crest, Listening as if to song yet bare of nest, Roost only of mist from whom all wings take wing: Even our God, the Weather, you deny; You blossom when you feel like blossoming, In a blasphemingly eternal spring. We have a word for such un-treelike stunts. We call them SABOTAGE. Since well-meant hints Have failed, permit the frankness of the old; The grove agrees it's time you're told: Your chance of passing next week's Woodlore Test Is—bear it oakly—not the best. You know the price! The beaver-foreman claims He needs just one more trunk to mend his dams.
ACT II (willow to oak)
Mad? No, I'm madness maddened (—into truth). When groves are mute, when outward wings are south, Hear—can't you hear?—the humming in my sap, Cascades more lyrical than any lark. Your "test"? The holy winds—for love of me Whose blindness dreams them into visibility— Will test your trunk with choice typhoons; They'll stretch you with a little thunderclap Before the foreman's tedious cuspid zeal. (thunder offstage; crash; willow solo) Such zephyrs are the moods we willows feel. The velvet bells of willowdom can peal Earthquakes far-off to match my faintest sigh. All far-off passions vibrate through my bark:— From outside through?, from inside through?, am I The echo or the strummer of earth's tunes?
ACT III
(spotlight on willow's soliloquy; in background, beavers in over-alls drag away storm-felled oak; stage floor as planetary globe; arched blue leaf overhead as sky)
Alone less sure of answers than at war. Mere echo (—strummer?), mad (—or wild with truth?), By contours of the winds lured far too far, I'm left behind when even God flies south (If "God" means all the climate I ignore). Alone with hints of hints. The world's a burr I'm stuck to. Dropping. Quick!, grow meanings back. Back, back; drop upward. Certainty's a rock Too lichen-slippery for a root's attack. There's one blue leaf: big mask;—it mocks, but I'll Know answers when it falls; can wait; meanwhile, To show mere sky I'm not its servitor, I'm burnt by snow and drunk on drouth And serve the inner Weather of my core.