The Hollow (18)
ghostly dock leaves
pressed against the window
old chicken house
gone but for their grins
our childhood collection
of mummified rats
once my best
climbing teacher
broken-limbed maple
stone wall
all the times
I’ve rebuilt it
Poèmes sur le thème : tree
Poèmes sur le thème « tree » sur Poets.by.
Leave-taking
the trees react to colder nights by stripping naked
the meadow too
it’s as if they’re about to set off somewhere
all excess baggage is left at the gate
the sun too is a budget traveler
abandoning most of the sky
the days are so quiet now
take me with you
even if there’s nowhere to go
even if it means leaving myself behind
Onion snow
The March winds
have blown wet snow
sideways against the trees—
look in one direction
and the woods are white;
in the other, brown.
The snow sticks to our boot soles,
lifting like lids
from jars full of spring.
Reach
After a hundred years of reaching
for the same, small portion
of filtered sunlight,
these three witch hazel trunks
have begun to merge. The ground bulges
over their common roots.
Back home, you stretch
a measuring tape from hand to hand
along your outstretched arms.
Clearing
Trees sway like drunks
in a sudden gust of wind—
the clacking of their branches.
The whole hillside
is in motion around me,
standing here with my head cold
almost gone.
How marvelous it is
just to breathe.
Deep snow
In all this blankness,
a squirrel finds the precise spot
it buried a nut.
Breaking trail with snowshoes,
I choose to believe
I’m half-floating, not half-sinking.
Clumps of snow sail off the trees,
making a random scatter
of oblong prints.
Primary school
Children in the woods:
at first I mistake their distant yelps
for coyotes.
When did I stop climbing trees?
Views are best when seasoned
with a little terror.
Once I found a dead cicada,
stuck half-way out
of its former self.
Seahenge
tree upended
made to flower downward
into the dark sky of the dead
who feed & return
who stand in circles
& spring after spring resprout
leaves of malachite
Knots
With some trees, the knotholes
are among the last things to go.
You can find them staring up
from the ground, eye sockets
that never belonged to a skull.
It makes sense that trees would grow
their hardest wood around the weakest
points in their architecture.
This is called the branch collar,
& it is woven with wood
first from the branch
as it overlaps onto the trunk
& then from the trunk
as it overlaps onto the branch.
Behind the collar, in the parent
trunk or limb, the branch core forms:
Death of the Author
A small pin-striped bird alights
on the dead cherry tree next to the porch
& starts gleaning its breakfast
from crevasses in the decaying wood.
At length I remember its name,
black-and-white warbler—
& in so doing, forget the name of the author
whose Collected Shorter Poems I hold
in my lap. They’re orphaned for more
than a minute by my poor memory.
If I can just get the first letter…
something beginning with a G, perhaps?
That letter like a smile
warped into a grimace…
Or a T, that tall gallows.
The warbler stops to issue his usual
Tree Without Birds
The tree without birds
is like a book without vowels
a mind without focus
a heart without tides.
Its limbs remain desolate
in the thick of summer.
It puts out leaves
but forgets to bloom
& its transactions with fungi
are strictly economic,
never lead to any
tempting truffle.
The wind plays it
like a mechanical instrument.
In bluest January
it doesn’t even remember
Poem for the New Year
The squirrel says: the trees
in which I have slept
are the color of the sun.
Leafless now and clear
all likely pathways. The tree peers
bleary-eyed through every scar
that used to be a leaf,
she is stiff and cold
and full of old voices.
I rub my face and neck against
her bark: wake up!
My tail trembles.
I am rainwater running
up and down the trunk,
from tree to tree I am wind
leaping, making the treetops sway.