jrlewis's blog

My tree

tells me I have got you, apple.

Now hand to branch 

to yes, take my trunk.

Yell oh,

here, like hair like feathers like leaves!

Will the rustling leaves

of the swaying tree

say, no yell, oh?

Adam’s apple, 

state the roots, stay the trunk,

and lunging branch.  

Branch

out into orchard, think of the leaves.  

Yes give us a trunk and another trunk.  

Tree

loves its apple

so yellow, yell oh!

We yell over and over oh,

before falling from the branch.  

Apple

loves the leaves.

So the tree

is asking touch my trunk.

Tough the bark of the trunk,

still it will yell oh!

Telling, poem ate tree. 

Tender it is; the branch

never leaves

apple.

Apple

is alive with trunk.  

Leaves

between orange and green and yell oh!

Growing to branch.

This is what it’s like making love with a tree.

Ah the apple.  Ah the leaves.  

Ah the trunk.  Ah the branch.  

Yell oh!  Ah, says the tree.

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What felt wrong last night, was the need to explain my fear, 

to justify my fear, 

to force my fear onto you?

Into you,

I want to pour,

to open, to offer only good things.  

But sometimes the asymmetry hurts.

The great St Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, 

the dome radially symmetrical,

each quadrant meets

one of the four spandrels.

Below the dome,

spandrels tapering triangular spaces.   

Two rounded arches at right angles are

byproducts of mounting a dome.  

Spandrel, a design fitted into its space, 

sits in the parts flanked 

by the heavenly.

Below a man,

representing one of the four biblical rivers 

Tigris, 

Euphrates, 

Indus, 

Nile, 

pours water 

from a pitcher in the narrowing space.

Below his feet

is elaborate.  That we to view it

as sense of the surrounding

necessary spandrels. 

They a space which the mosaicists worked.

They set the symmetry

such abound.  

We do not impose our biological biases upon them, 

a series. 

http://faculty.washington.edu/lynnhank/GouldLewontin.pdf

I think it was not fit,

but friction, when his limbs brushed

my back, he was already rushing, running, resisting. 

I was writing and he was life, 

a teacher; a man whose shirt was always unbuttoned

one button too low.  He was showing me how,

in fact, I was wanting you.  Now he is not wanting

to know me, now I am growing away from him, now I am

going where I am wanted. 

He was younger than you, yet, there was such richness

in rest or rant or wanting.  There was my writing.

“What do you know?”

said the sister to the writer.

“A writer is a little island, a summer land, 

what is a writer in winter?”

“What was I, when I was your age?”

I was torn.”

“Yes”

“Who are you, when you are not writing?  

You are the listener, the reader, the other.”

“A writer is only one who writes.  

Who I am, when I am not writing?”

“What does it mean to be a mature writer?

You should learn there are no mistakes only poems.”

“When I am writing, I am talking to you,

who are you?”

“When you are not writing, you are talking to me.

Who am I?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I am still torn; bitterness is also basic to us.”

“Well yes, we are twin cultures, where a poem

can be a puzzle, like a chemistry problem.”

“Either is interplay between the part

4.

Here is a tree that is her horse away

from home; it carries her a way from her

home pain,this roaning out gelding, bay.  

Sitting at sixteen two hands; she is higher,

safer from ants and students alike.  She

is resting with her horse before the course.

She must be quiet and still for the tree

like a horse can sleep standing up, an old horse

can turn into one of the trees dotting the field.

She doesn’t stand on the second branch, it is sway

-backed, so she won’t pain the animal that way.

She is tender towards the tree, and he still yields

in a rustling of leaves and legs, he comes

to love; he wants to be her treehouse, horse, home.  

3.

She and the tree be together

in the afternoon sun.  She is gently

fingering its bark; the tree is thinking only

about her.  How her hands are slow travelers

on its trunk.  Her hands are soft though

her feet are tough.  It is the first time for the tree

being climbed.  Can I hold her? wonders the tree.

Will my twigs tear? worries the tree.   Oh!

She is sitting now, in the understory. 

Here is a tree feeling human flesh resting,

neither perching, nor running, just resting. 

She is starting to imagine a story,

where the branch before her is the neck of a horse. 

Here is a tree that thinks itself a horse. 

2.

Here is a tree drowsing;

there she is, walking along the trail.

She is singular, thinks the tree,

a human, out in the heat, without a dog. 

Humans, like dogs and birds, are pests, the tree thinks

heat makes humans smell most foul.

She has walked too far into the mid-west sun,

too far away from the university. 

She lets out a sigh of relief

after laying her cheek against the trunk

its thick bark.  The tree is learning it can offer relief,

if not to itself, to another, and that is a sort of power.

She is not nesting or shitting; she is only

resting; she and the tree together.