Reflections on a Tree. A Solitary Tree.
I am not as tough as you.
That is why I came to see you today.
But I thought you were only beautiful.
In that, I was wrong.
I noticed you live your life without orders.
I would burn Rome to the ground
to learn to do that.
I need to stand near you.
Stand right here, removed,
and see all of you.
And your outward reaching palms of swishy leaves.
Your skin wrinkled.
Beard-worthy, craggy, unyielding and scarred.
You are old.
And proud.
If I touch you, I will feel you as rough.
Hardy and tough.
Engaged strength in your pyramidal base.
At once, personal and natural.
I want to touch you
but then would need to stand so close
you would blot out the sky.
That would have you without frame.
That would leave me without the vision I need
and words without order.
Were I to be blinded, I would still see you.
Now, I will always know you.
Of your determined truth.
Unfazed by aloneness and without plural.
All others are gone,
and you are the remainder I attend to.
This must have been as horrible
as a car crash
in front of eyes.
What profit was there to this world
when they were vanished?
It is hard to unlearn things
as we think they should always be.
They were never nominal,
but now gone,
a monument to man’s nonchalance in hacking desires.
You are not broken.
You have never been broken.
And I have respect to learn of you.
You are not immortal, but you will outlast me.
So far from your scrawny start to life,
surviving through sky’s tortures
and spotty showers.
Selected to exist above all the slash and gash.
Last remaining of the grandees.
You and I, don’t need to be the same.
If that ever were to be,
one of us would be redundant.
One of us could be eliminated.
And that must never ever come true.
To my unending sorrow,
I have not promises to give you.
No loss.
You have self-mastery and grandeur,
in the gamut from then to now.
I now understand in your every gesture
you king the day
and queen the night.
With a throat full of singer birds who speak at will.
Memento mori of the Field Holler.
I am humbled.
Your truth must know your beauty,
and your beauty must know your truth.
But their introduction must be while blind,
behind a veil,
with desire for union,
since truth is always more clear-eyed
and most difficult for the alive.
Recklessness destroys.
But it takes genius to gracefully embrace the sky.
True genius to grow.
I will not simply step away.
I will step back and back and away,
until you are small.