Carya Illinoensis

O the depth of creation within a single tree!
Bear witness to the full, deep, branch-fraught timbre,
Tracing her graceful sweep into the feathered sky.
Sit, neck folded, thinking oneself beneath her smoke-like, time-placed frame,
As the ripple of a thought finds its way from beneath this, life’s loam-filled stage,
And rises, vast and rumbling, from somewhere beneath your quiet earth-strewn perch.
Into the mind falls the simply-carved vision of the vast, hidden half of her hourglass;
That, like her poet-born brother, fills the heart’s eye with wonder
At the woefully limited scope of its own age and vision.
Like the self-woven plight of we simpleton farmers of the earth,
Who orbitedly cast for ourselves roles of the crouchers
Far below the trunk-raised heights of the truly blessed,
All the while daily ignoring the ground-covers roots,
The twisted veins of the hope-starved that lie beneath us.
Great storm wrinkled maiden, your Maker knew well his craft
When He spilled your mighty arms from His heart.
It was He who filled your rough pages with soft, brown Light,
That we, the hate-blinded children of the dust,
Might bask in your within subtle glow.

The Rain on Her Face

It is but a moment. Soft, intangible, wind-swept: a fallen leaf from the shadowy limbs of time—skittering beyond the boundaries of vision surrounded and jostled by its countless brother-children. She is captured by a rush of swirling mysteries, held captive by a heart still ponderously balanced on newly-formed legs of emotion. Yet, inexorably, inescapably, relentlessly, her heart-fawn presses—is pressed—forward, forced to translate the native language of her skin into the oversimplified monosyllabic tendencies of her partially defined reactions.

Her eyes become the novice baker, spilling the myriad contents of a well-mixed second onto their wide surface, sifting through its intricate recipe and willing her to distinguish one infinite ingredient from the next. Still her heart plods on, held within the tender grasp of an instant, willing her to taste its subtle mountain of flavors as a whole—more fully than well-trained connoisseurs with their inhibited, overly-experienced criticisms.

This moment is hers; dawning on her Eden-heart with rapid, concurrent emotions, collapsing in an ecstatically shivering heap upon her doorstep. Here cold, laughter, joy, fear, and curiosity vault her inevitably still for a small handful of heartbeats. She is lost within the brilliant, bewildering cacophony of impulses and questions, careful to select the correct homage to pay to this sudden stranger.

And when at last she is pulled past this moment by the mere necessity of existence, with which color will she paint her face for the next? What, more than the mere currency of time, will be lost in the picture she will paint there? For, in choosing a response to each moment, we become the ever-compelled merchants of life. Finding a smile, we lose a frown; or, finding the cold, we miss our chance for a moment of laughter amid the rain.