Cross-currents and tumbling desire of aspens in a summer wind, shimmering in a rustle and whisper of leaf undersides turned pale yellow, each upper side a trembling of bright green. The whole frame a lit firework of feeling where all surfaces and shoulders of wood and leaf touch and quiver to the wind’s quaking unspoken desire. Not to be lightly spoken of. Your species name so common on our tongue the mind’s eye forgets the continued revelation of your kind. A single branch, a copse, a nest of bright copper for the dying year. All the forests of the world were wild wood once and proclaim the leafy hope and snares of human paradise. The wild wood, bramble, columbine, the oak tree’s deciduous stability of half-light. In your branches the robin and the wren, the crows, the rooks, the owls, the sparrow- hawk gliding the fine speckled corridors of light. Of all your many worlds I’ll start by naming home, this sharp evergreen night’s rough-barked verticality of totem and grey wood lifted two hundred feet to a cold sky, its grey clouds unseen above the world’s green turn of pine and hemlock, fir and cedar shadowing the padded needle beds in their brown sleep. Even here, Pan’s mad flute wakes them all, a scurry of chipmunks and tremulous mice, a moment’s panic before the creaking whine of a branch lifts the hair straight on the neck, the owl’s prey screams in discovered claws and the patient empty darkness of the deep wood returns to quiet. Even then, the still temple of the northern night opening its doors to the first delicate light and the nightjar burring at a branch edge is nothing to the jungle’s southern tumult and tropic dark panoply of explosive sound. In that equatorial fusion of heat and noise, where a scream would be lost in the whistling, cawing, shuddering, sighing rippling, spider-monkeyed laugh and great shaking of the canopy’s jungle dark essence, there lies that eternally moving half-hidden, essentially frightening forest of our own inner night. Down below, the dream of those dark limbs turning now feminine, now snake-like, erotically refusing to be found, leads us down into that glistering world-wide treasure of wetness and wild abandon, the marsh. The dank water’s cool refusal of dryness a sworn enemy to the clarity our yearning demands, every footstep filled with mud, every feeling a mere mushroom subsumed by damp, a fever of scents, sounds and recollection, how the bark smells, how the frogs breathe, how the greens seem darker still. How the faint brushing sting of nettle feels on passing skin. The stagnant still fullness of it all with no place to rest, sit, camp, cook, build, get in, get out, lie down with self or other. The infuriating self-satisfied independent non-human presence of this methane-flitted, black and fiery incandescence of wetness eschewing our praise, resting into its own eternal wet grave of damp hidden mischief. The damned and lovely swamp. Not forgetting for one moment the dry desert branches of the world’s desiccated, rough-barked, wax-leafed elders. The pinon, chaparral, boll-weed and wind-dried dust-loving Joshua, even the names have a dry mouth salted by heat and smothered by thirst. Tenacity a prize of their kind, living patiently through the hard baked inhospitable prison of eternal summer, and they need, we still do not believe it, just the one, gifted, single drop of fecund rain swimming through red earth to break out in a blood red, snow white festival of still flowers. Or a lit inextinguishable fire of perfect yellow. All your many kinds are filled with our stories. We know you, name you Aspen, Rowan, Linden, Oak, and remember Pan’s stable of haunting desire, Kevin’s seat of still prayer, Buddha’s explosive clarity beneath the Bodhi’s protecting shadow of knowledge. Christ’s arms like branches on the still sapling of longing and loss. Your stories are our welcome night sign of stop and rest and sky and stars and forgotten sleep where we wake again to find we are surrounded, embellished, frighted, nourished, sheltered, restored, rejected and inhabited by - how shall I ever say your name? Wood, trunk, branch, leaf, boreal harmony of green in-breath, my hands clapping, eyes opened, mouth attempting the song of your unspeakable gifts and grace again and again- the full hidden not to be said, mysterious and unutterable name of your full breath. Tree. --from Fire in the Earth
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The power of inspired utterance
I feel like I've been been round the whole world here...a tour of beauty and of mystery. And something so sad underneath. Haven't read this before. Is that collection old or very new?