There’s a gentleness we haven’t learned yet,
but we’ve seen it—the way an early morning haze
can settle in the wayside hedges of lilac and yew,
permeate the emptiness between every scaly
bud and leafstalk until it becomes bound,
fully contained, shaped by the spires,
the stiff pins and purple-white blossoms
of that tangled wall.
There’s a subtlety we haven’t mastered yet,
but we recognize it—the way moonlight passes
simultaneously upon, through, beyond
the open wing of the crane fly
without altering a single detail
of its smallest paper vein. We know
there is a perfect consideration
of touching possible. The merest snow
accomplishes that, assuming the exact
configuration of the bristled beggarweed
while the beggarweed remains
exclusively itself.
If I could discover that same tension
of muscle myself, if I could move, imagining
smoke finding the forest-lines of the sun
at dusk, if I could place my hand
with that motion, achieve the proper
stance of union and isolation
in fingers and palm, place my hand
with less pressure than a water strider
places by the seeds of its toes
on the surface of the pond, balance
that way, skin to bark, my hand
fully open on the trunk of this elm tree
right now, I know it would be possible
to feel immediately every tissue imposition
and ringed liturgy, every bloodvein
and vacuum of that tree’s presence, perceive
immediately both the hard, jerking start
of the seedling in winter and the spore-filled
moss and liquid decay of the fallen trunk
to come, both the angle of tilt in the green sun
off every leaf above and the slow lightning
of hair roots in their buried dark below,
know even the reverse silhouette of my own hand
experienced from inner bark out,
even the moment of this very revelation
of woman and tree itself where it was locked
millennia before in those tight molecules
of suckers and sapwood. Without harm
or alteration or surrender of any kind, I know
my hand, laid properly, could discover this much.
Maybe someone, given enough practice, given
enough desire, might be able to dream
a feat like this sometime
into reality.
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