<\/p>\n
I<\/p>\n
Gusts run through the sapling and it shivers and sways,
\nthe leaves lift delicate green, glittering silver,
\nsettle shadow-dark, lift green and silver again,
\nand the tree is an actress on a stage,
\nswooning, flinging her hands to the sky. In this play
\nthe bodily motion is beyond measurement
\nand the speech beyond hearing, it is all the tree\u2019s
\nsingle intricate electric charge and flow. The sorrow
\nin this one in the lead role so full of finding,
\nand of being found, the joy so full of searching,
\nthe leaves are castanets she clicks while wind
\nundresses her of matter, dresses her in spirit, undresses
\nand dresses her again many times every minute
\nas in a wedding dance of the visible and invisible.<\/p>\n
II<\/p>\n
Because of a chance wind and chance open window
\nnear a well-travelled street, I have become an audience,
\nthe young actress is familiar to me, and the tall tree,
\nI understand now, is the small potted tree that vanished
\nfrom my grandmother\u2019s room in the care centre
\nwhile she lay in the hospital and we combed out
\nher long hair and spoke into her ear, telling her
\nthat it was all right, she could let go. The leaves flash
\nwith her senses though her old life is gone,
\nand she is in a play again circa nineteen-thirty,
\nand it is a play she could never have acted in until now
\nthough it was always within the play of her life,
\nand she is alive in the role and cannot know it, as the tree
\ncannot know she is the way it lives in the wind.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It\u2019s standing still at the edge
\nof a clearing, pale glacial
\neyes narrow and lined in black,
\nthe wolf\u2019s kohl. The entire wolf
\nthe thick kohl of my own eyes,
\nit brings jagged gray trees, stones
\nlying alive on the ground, rain
\nlike a bead curtained doorway,
\nsteel wool cloud and the dark\u2019s sheen
\nsharp into my eyes. Without
\nany flaw in its fury,
\na wolf of antimony,
\nit destroys impurities,
\nit eats the decrepit king
\nof my eyes and a reborn
\nking emerges from a fire,
\nthe burned wolf hissing like rain
\nand shaking away the ash.
\nThe trees have burned up, the wolf
\nlifts its nose to smoke, charcoal,
\nand licks the visible clean,
\nleaving the two pinpoint lights
\nof its eyes, dawn, gold-touched air.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I<\/p>\n
The waters of the run-off surge through the ravine,
\nan unending succession of lightning strokes,
\nthe mist drives down between the steep banks and the trees,
\nthe rain shuts its vault, the creek shakes the skeleton
\nof its rock course, it shoots along skull after skull,
\nthe waters become a liquid natural wax. The creek
\nof wax moves smooth and quick into the mouths
\nopen to receive it and let it fill the mould.<\/p>\n
II<\/p>\n
Curved white edges of creek ripples cut away the confine,
\nthe entire creek pulls itself into the body
\nof a leaping raincloud-coloured animal. The moments
\nthat animal of wax is encased and melted out
\nare the moments the iron oxides, charcoal and oils
\nof the first paintings run wet on the walls
\nof caves illuminated by fires, the colours
\nstill deepening within the bounding outlines.<\/p>\n
III<\/p>\n
Dark grains of the unencumbered musk pod
\nflow out with the creek\u2019s lost and shapeless wax,
\nand over the waters faceless as the first waters,
\nthe creek mist thickens, the musk it is carrying
\nof ravine leaves, glacial till and ozone thickens.
\nMetals present at the beginning melt, and the alloy
\nrushes again into the mould it finds, and that finds it,
\nwithin the shifting vacancies and probabilities.<\/p>\n
IV<\/p>\n
The living deer stepped out of mountain top mist
\ninto the envelope of a clearing in the mist,
\nits eyes glittering soft black, the way a sculpture arrives,
\nthe mould removed, the polished bronze undraped,
\nbut this deer melted into mist leaving the blackness
\nthat poured in its eyes, and in the blackness
\nits scent, the sweetness of copper, the nullity of tin,
\nand the musk of the rain that was always the traveller.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Praise Tree I Gusts run through the sapling and it shivers and sways, the leaves lift delicate green, glittering silver, settle shadow-dark, lift green and silver again, and the tree is an actress on a stage, swooning, flinging her hands to the sky. In this play the bodily […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":777,"parent":229,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-257","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":697,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/257\/revisions\/697"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/229"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue13\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}