ROWAN emerged from the ephemeral murmurs of the forest mingled with the tree’s characteristics and myth. OAK counterplays it — a tangible yang to its elusive yin.
ROWAN
Mountain-ash, ash of sky,
mystics bend to you,
archaic itches are scratched
in the fires
your belly lights.
I worry your round, red berries
like a bursting rosary of darkness
between my thumb and forefinger.
And still you rise bold and terrifyingly
ambivalent.
The blue early mists are making
sport of clarity,
but your leaf-barriers —
fossils to simplicity, —
stitch their samplers like skin
in the paling dawn,
and resilient, puncture the fable
of delicacy.
White stars cluster in
your laurels
and when the dew dries,
the dusted ones bring
forth prophecy.
Blackbirds devour
your bloody delights;
and from your bosom,–
(luster of the eye)–
pale and moonlit,
a woman walks forth.
OAK
A boy at play,
a rattling in his brain
when the forest dances
and he dances with it,
recognizing the rhythms
of old drum-beats in
the depth of the forest
as his own heartbeat.
And he grabs the ground
with his toes
and twirls,
swirls, a gyrating gambol
of joy,
spinning and grinning
into the moss
at his feet,
and he sinks into its
green velvet claws,
knowing he is home.
But the years,
the years tear away his
sweet surrender.
Now,
tall, wasting in a spiritual dissention,
he is guarding his secrets
like a weapon
or a stalemate in a holding pen.
Unassured and broken,
he scars and drinks and scars more
as the world around him dreams
and seems small in the tips
of his madness.
He takes nothing,
gives nothing,
finds nothing in the scheme of neverending
blindness and unadulterated ferocity.
Brown eyes murder any desire
he might carry into tomorrow;
a reworked seam under his skin
vibrates the extensions of sound
and tears itself free.
The blood streams over his bare feet
and still, he holds himself upright
by sheer grit.
He didn’t take the blade himself,
but surrendered it to the one person
who could hurt him.
And she did,
without a second glance.
That was years ago,
but the bleeding only stops when
he breathes in and wills
himself
to step into the cut glass
that will take him into
the river.
But the river is far again.
Daily it dissolves
and drives him out of his mind
wandering,
looking for it
in its new capitulation.
Till it re-gathers and fills in the
gaps of earth
constituting a nourishment
only he can smell.
His skin,
leather like the wind,
burns with the old scrapes
of who he used to be.
Lover, fighter, a malcontent
disconcerted with what was
in the face of what could be.
Now he is faced with
a disappearing reality.
But he is bold.
And he remembers his
old heartbeat,
the murmurs of the trees,
the moss gripping his feet
and the drums
holding cadence to
a memory
of life
and hope
and wild abandon
amidst the wilder
landscape of his child self.
And knows,
instinctively,
that he is a child still.
Drinking the sap of a restless wood,
he finds his life
reassembled, anchored in the earth;—
and he no longer needs
a river that refuses
to let itself be found.
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