after an etching by Leonard Baskin
The great tree stands in a corner of your youth unhurriedly
gathering rings and massively sidles up close to your birth
while you are not looking. It peers down through your life
as if over a cliff, the great tree, more sheerly connected
to your body than you were much of that time, here beneath it
looking up at the limbs you climbed like years into a being
you loved, your anchor in times of loss and in the
times of plenty because when it dropped leaves, it let you see
how provisional things were. As with fruit and family
squandered, you came to understand life was not so bad nor yet
so good as you might think, when its layers turned dark and blew away. Your life is slower now, you too, almost
quiet sometimes, shedding leaves that whisper where
they lie. Everybody knows a tree they sooner or later
return to, no matter how awful the excuses for wanting to roam
the old streets where the great tree was nanny, the one
who may or may not grow old, who blossomed manna
you were happy to risk your limbs for, to plumb the openings
of her trunk, wedge knees to chin in a womb, in a great
tree of longings, of fledglings always about to fall
from the nest of feathers you dream.