Mythologies

The trees undress, and start their yearly shivers
harrowed, flailing, by a pack of crows
that chases each into its fixed adventures,
anchored to the ground, where row by row
they undergo a parable: without
their armor, sparring with the wind.
The path between them, garbage smeared around
them, daily runners jostling out and in,
sending up frail plumes of breath as white
as thought that wears no language. What’s been fought
by branch and drop and bark above them writhes
and symbols truth by nothing so precise
as words. Though often, like a morning fraught
with birds, trees haunt the sky with mythologies.

11.12.09