Branches

There is a twist in that branch
gnarled and loping over itself
as if a hand had rested there
and compressed all the strivings
of that great tree into a single
moment - an apex like the bend
of leaf springs designed to raise
some unfinished work above
the final weight of winter's arrival.

It had rooted beside a moon-dark'd
arroyo more than a century ago,
weaving the hillside into a basket
of cloudburst dimension,

commensurate with the season's need to
overflow— to join in the rush of abundant runoff
and descend in torrents to the wash below
while a smaller, 'metered' portion paints
its crazy pictures over the roadway on its hop
&skip down to the garden
                                                  at the other side.


The year before she died, Edna said
there was little need to bring water
from the draw or worry about root rot:

" That old tree is one big garden regulator;
high enough to slow the summer burn,
wide enough to spread out the winds."


(Edna was bent with time but not concern)

"With patience," she said, "it will stretch
your harvest yield well beyond first frost,
dry up in time for the last crisp corn
and roost the occasional crow
a little lost, that's all,

                                                                           storm tossed,
                                                                           but none the worse…."

(facts imparted with such intimacy,
these bewildered birds…, one was
hard pressed not to turn round
and check for eavesdroppers)

"Like this humming-bird stopper."
she continued, refilling an old mason jar
with sugar-water, pushing on the wide-mouth
cork until she'd worked a tampon through it
with its string-end dangling into the sweet-water.


Years later on a stark, contrasty night,
with a load of firewood and moonlight
at my back,


                                       the biography
of that great tree unfolded before me
like a photo of the heavens emerging
on the flat plate of yellowing winter grass

-- not in the stretch of days linked linear, but
in myriad dark forks and branches reticulated
through the spattered light; each an oblique answer
to some old solar scald, a small abrasion of crow's claw
or in silent yield to the persuasions
                                                        of wind-bent leaf .


At my feet, a moon-pressed serigraph:
its spiraled, varicose arms that swept me
into the century's loom as the shuttle
moved across the shadowed earth,
her stories of letting nature be
wove into seamless web

the whole tree - root, bole and branch.

Above me, now the apex stands again
against a swollen moon, the open palm
of desert sky rests on that distillate burl
its radial threads of light clutch at my ankles,
draw me onward, stooped but not broken

by the great war
on the imagination


                                                              still able to fly
                                                              into the swallow of its branches


                                                                                                                      like an intruding bird.




© 1999 red slider. All rights reserved.



    Back to the 'Poems for Change' index

    To Red Slider's website