4

4.

The leaves are in cahoots, 

unburdened to the light hand of which

they are part:

swift fingers stars on the hand of your rising

                                                          tree

that mounts the reflection 

                                     with no original;

opening the sluice-gates. Your pedal

strapped to the floor of both. The little boat–

                           the only one, your father’s 

                                                    oil-cloth 

coracle, returns after 100 years of rain

a fleet of more than you can count. A sort of spring

a refusal and proliferation green against the earth’s held breath: 

season’s descent through wood as we’re made of 

‘burst/As it has [n]ever done.’

                           As Saint George, or the Anglo Saxon 

under the grey stone goes against what he calls his sky-borne foe.  

         

I’m imagining a certain tree, old as trees are, silver maple, split by lightning and the grey stone in its center exposed now ten feet in the air. I’m imagining this stone in the center of me (go ahead, you imagine it, too) exposed now to the cold air of my calling it forth. You can listen to the rain, it’s always there.

Rain between the stone and the tree (that is life?) and the leaves, and the stone is in them all: before them, with its own kind of light, urgent and with a supernal stringency for the making of symbols from the Inside. Everything receives its clarity, but not its purpose.

Press close. Closer. In the varying patterns Eros quickens simple as a door. The heart a door.