COMPOSURE

Learning ink strokes in spring,
I spill indigo on the painting in my manual
entitled "Two Trees Together and Separate";
an idea trees behind my house took up long ago,
a branch shared, shaping them as an H.
Inexplicable coupling, the bark-tough fiber
and way of living things.

Energies rise when watching trees: limbs cross each other,
lost by late summer somewhere higher, bluer.
The wind blows, and, as if hearing a whistle in the mulberry grove,
the dog awakens to head for the woods.
His tracks should be gilded in gold,
judging by the number who've taken that path.

Cinnabar, umber and scarlet, the shades of leaves
after frost. Roughed up, rouged, they spiral down
to be sacked and heaved away, like the dying once were
on a son's back. A woman I know grows older
and lighter each day.
Each week she changes money to a bag of silver
dollars and gives them to the poor by the river.

One winter I mistook a group of homeless
asleep in the park gazebo for musical instruments,
covered and waiting to be played
until the largest one, whom I momentarily thought a bass fiddle,
stood up in his army blanket but would not look at me.
That same season a fourth grader steadily held my eye
when asked how he'd killed his brother's kitten. He said
he'd poppawhellied the kitten's head off with a bike
because his brother sat on his puppy in the driveway.
and bounced.