I. Malus Coronaria
The outer bark cleaved
so as to summon
a slug, these oars
paddling air
opposite sun.
Nocturnal
in the twisting motion
of why. The first breath
clings to morning,
a bulbous growth. A coat
of tongues, the color
of still-remaining
rain, its fleshy antennae
articulating the frozen
psalm in which
time, the needle
of another species,
accumulates.
Would that self could
fracture, get rusty,
fall at the level
of its footprint, the same
shape as fruit
on more naked, ashy
bark. The protective bark
of my own thinking
slowly makes its way
through the tunnel
into the library
of unforgotten dirt.
The web appears.
The outer layers flake, exposing
the bone of inner
sustenance. I was told
a bear broke the branch
of this crab apple
while the tree inside me
slept. Animal : nothing less
than person bare
of naming. A body
scooped open
curves into arrow, pointing
to the pine, or vanishes
into weather. This
supposed irregularity,
as if a puckered mouth,
as if the woody eye
that grows within.
II. Betula Papyrifera
The spectacle
peels back to reveal
a language with which
you’ve clothed yourself.
The long legs of what
was once a spider
lie flat against
what is, as if
painted there.
A pair of black
apostrophes
rise up from the book
the dirt is writing.
The serrated past
hangs off you, like errant
ink, a posthumous
signature. It sways,
renounces part of who
you were, split
but still attached
to living. You ripen
into passageways
for shifting pockets
of light. The script,
a muted orange.
The letters, the leftover
pieces of night
carry each other
from right to left.
Like a sail, like a torn
shirt you can’t remove,
like being stuck and falling
at the same time, like everything
inside the woody cradle,
the invisible maw
of becoming. The page,
not bleeding, turns
into nectar.
III. Thuja Occidentalis
Where light swims
into the air’s unwritten
zeroes, the spider
fuses cedar to clover
beside the muddy creek.
The way the branches grow
when I close my eyes
and listen to them.
The frail pieces
of mishearing pile up
like diamonds
in the night and now
I see more clearly.
I rub my personhood
against the little thorns,
the imperceptible
spark.
There, in the crevice
formed by beckoning,
the open cave
between the not-yet
branches. Skinny
amber fingers
push themselves
out in almost perfect
horizontal lines, guided by
the hum and tick
of chlorophyll
deep inside.
Like a body
weaving itself
to the earth
to sip the sun
made softer
by how the rain
ignites the green.
Like sex, sticky
between the seams.
IV. Sorbus Americana
The field guide says
in autumn they mature : the bright
red congregations,
but all I see is ghostfruit.
This past weekend, the engine
of someone else’s war
walked into a man who
walked into a synagogue. Worship
sends approximations
into sky, gathers
what comes crashing.
The stillness of
death, so difficult
to enter, ripening.
The wound collapses
into everyone : planted here.
The act of turning turns
into a tree whose name
carries the weight
of unbecoming : ash :
the crawling anthem
of not. Its lean trunk
arches into the larger
pine, where soft green arrows
lick the thicker gray.
The bark like strands
of hair : falling
Like the words I follow
a little too far before
turning back : the smoothness
I perceive. A kind of triangle
or nearer friend opens
its mouth to say : the wound :
wet and spreading
from a distance.