Seeing From Far

Seeing From Far 

Dedicated to Mary Jordan

There are good things in this world.

It is dusk.

It is the good darkness

of a women’s hands that touch loaves.

The spirit of a tree begins to move.

                        James Wright

Maybe because it’s been unsensable

in other years, but this year it seems

the white oak was waiting

to open her canopy.  Each leaf,

curled like a fiddlehead, curtsied

to itself, shy regent of our lawn.  It paused,

a taut line beneath a bobber

of Hairstreak chrysalises, as though

by the thousands caterpillars hatched

on the twigs when we weren’t looking.

In stasis they shouldered the whole

bruising winter, deeper into spring

than all the other trees that went

to leaf and snowed their last

white or pink or lilac snow.  

Through it I’ve watched

the day-moon rise through her bare

arms all winter long, thinking

how simply we lay our faith

down on the ground beneath such a tree

and wait

for the earth or the sky or the wind to say now

it’s okay now to push out against

the hundred hundred knuckles that squeeze

everything in, that fire, eventually

a slow explosion into the very doubt

that makes us want to cut it

all down.  Listen: who, without such oaks

can bear a landscape of twisted limbs

and blue pocked-with-winter sky?  Without

a little conviction of the unfolding 

canopy?

Do you ever feel like you’ve been eaves-

dropping on a timid spring? 

That you’re divining for the all

chrysalises we stand to clap for

once they look up, down at an acorn scattered

ground and begin the long flight

into the green leaves after all that snow?

Oak, you can see from far.

You have taught us to plumb the way

you plumb: light inside the shell, light inside

the kernel, light inside

the effervescent root.

I think you are what we all wait for:

A someone to lean into us

to dig and fix a seed.

Later you’ll return to watch us open

our leafy hands, broad and warm,

the way you taught us, listening

the way you taught us,

sheltering us from the cold crusts

of winter, drying us in the sun

to push us gently

into the cool shade

of an ever-afterwards.