from being a burden to me.
Flannery O'Connor
The Habit of Being
It's winter trees that seem (or seam)
against the lilac
sky (I've made off
with that from someone else but God
for the life of me I can't tell) branch
and twig and picked
and puckered shut rhyzome
that, now you have to look up for it,
call to mind the central nervous system
(like it's some train station
like if you think about it it kinda is)
I saw on exhibit last fall, the tall
rigid Plasticine filigrees reaching
out placating or supplicating or I mean
it seems leaves falling and rotting on their own
on the bottoms of swamps on the banks
of streets or country sideroads,
how those old stone walls have come
to be covered by winter after winter
of salts and sands and resilient
varieties of moss or this one leaf
I saw yesterday it was a butterfly it was
a chipmunk with a hunk of something
on its tongue it was a nose or a throat
and it was what it was: a wintered
over oak leaf roan and not so
fragile as you may think and still
ain't it something under this sky ain't it
something lookit, aint it some
crisp and biting morning come up
whole come up from the bottom
how the pain starts in the toe
but you don't know it until the nerve
says so, until it runs all the way up,
up and breathless, until it says so,
until it zips all the way back
like a sizzling hot rivet tossed
and caught on the dead center chest
pocket on the top of the mop of hair
and aint that blaze a sun you've aw hell
Christ falling from the sky all been
looking up the whole time for?
No comments:
Post a Comment