The Twisted Tree

In incest it binds around its self
As if it were a belly dancer caught in pumice.
It stood alone in unknown age. Its fingers curled.
They beckoned in blindness anyone who’d listen.
Listen to the tale from acorn to forsaken, when its bark
In its filaments forming upstanding waves
as smooth as they could be
wretched upright for all to see.

How many gales ran through its leaves forming
Storm songs?
Was it perverted gene, or time, in its grand uncertainty
That orchestrated the branches weary journey from its mother trunk?
In winter it sleeps.
When exactly, does a tree awaken? When does dead wood
Become character, flourishing and nourishing?

The two birds that came back, for going on twenty years,
Last spring, or the one before, were no more.
Perhaps the harsh cold claimed them.
Or maybe they new the crooked Summer Palace’s secret:

The pale green mould has taken hold.
The vast crack with the splintered mouth
Is a wound that speaks of finality.
One more gust, just one more, will rip the lop sided ancient
From the ground that it fed with its countless dead;
The leaves it dropped, as a payment.
They were shed, at the same time,
Each year.
In the chill of dull October
A custom, a ritual even
Soon to be over.