The Innisfree no. 10: My Tulip Trees

A tree’s life, their form.

The gnarled twisting

of their long life’s choices

reaching forth.

Sun-dappled grasping.

And thus freezing

as age and physics compel.

All those accumulations!

They are there to see

plain in the bark.

Plain in the whorls,

and in the hidey holes

of midnight creatures.

And in the wounds, surely.

I am also an accumulation.

I am bent and brittle

cracked and loose in the roots

from reaching forth. 

My own star-kissed grasping.

My body and my ways and God.

Three witnesses.