The Forest for the Trees

Habitation for small cost

is showing up and staying on,

admitting settlement, colony,

dwelling place; what better place,

night after night bearing out

the contrivances of will, the single

clarity of lives heading North

or South, rising or falling

out of every woodman's tracking,

a lively middle class of leaves

that scatter resembling clouds

drawing the loose facet of shade.

Where half of fiction is fact, night

is lack of day, and day loses itself

correcting judgments, finds leaving

skinned bark in negotiation of oak,

hemlock, aspen, or pine, the dark and

stout, rough-hewn and mossy, the steady

wood, deserting itself to integrate

a network of shapes that sway and foliate

and fall, easy pulpwood with years grown

out of windowpane to picture here as

well as there palpitating rows and hills,

to stalk as far as the eye can see, as

evergreen, everything that vines balance

on stems, that grab and catch and bend

just to pull skin through, to justifiably

bloom.

It is the warring ambition of thickets

to hold unequal grain, dream original forms

of light and seed, evolution holding up

the burst in blood, thin wilderness of b.ain,

leaving nothing to hold or frame or hide

behind, but native fact, free and natural law.

It is that part branching, everything growing

bark, and fields crossed in the piercing arrows

of lots that leave light divided, driven deep

and ragged in bloom and gloss, harvest and yield

that refuse tracing, the outward collectable whole

compulsive and weakened, superficial and failing,

inadmissive at heart, like the increasingly

floral greeting I do not heed or understand but

rearrange to suit myself that the sweet life begins

when the bitter one goes, that the soul strays

when light moves, that we've come and gone through

irresponsive zones, bound to spend time elsewhere.