A fence, row of bare-branched thin-trunked trees across a field. A margin. Standing still like your underarm hair crushed in summer sweat. The fence, chain link. A tree overarching weaves out towards the frame – arms, or torqued limbs ajar. A door open. Light filtered soft and hard edge. A day of what it means to look out of focus. The tree, skin of dark shadows, awaits a poet’s fine pen. To draw.
A tree, a clearing broken open by limbs stretched out to almost touch the houses. Domestic surround and a sky so low down here to settle in – clouds almost adrift between branches. The canopy carved into this tiny fretwork of life beings wintering over. A shadow on teeth ground erases fine distinctions.
Whirling dervish of blur, the camera’s eye skirting full-blown canopy into memory of movement. Burst stretch marks of time caught up in motion rolling over to meet another branch. The space between mimics the underground network of fungal speech.
Winter storm. A clearing. The dog. Memory of bark. Claws dig into soil, uproot grass on the edge, a trunk. Spindly bark story of meadow’s surround. An upturned bonnet, the splayed branch of ventricular stretch. The writer moves forward to enter in, disappears behind a forest of limbs.
Upside of this under, a gasp of look exists somewhere between sky and canopy. The child’s memory bank prepares the writer for this moment. Return to the climb: one foot and arms limbering up. To ache for the arch of foliage.
Bird on a wire careens through the lineup. Linked layers of up. A carved out horizon stutters to the bottom of trunk.
A tree.
And grass, snow-scarred scrap.
(improvisations with thanks to Margaret Christakos)
the pomegranate 