trees

trees
marks meaningful
as defined by those who know
what's best meant by this or the other
some more than others.
Not one a poet writing with fingers and with toes.
The fingers and the toes have their own insistence
and what are we to do?
Swpet away to wordlessness.
Washed the words we set them to dry on towels,
aside the pots and pans from last night's dinner
More people eat dinner than poems, it's true.

Poems feel a void, replete with
electro tech babbling backgrounds like streams of consciousness
with nothing heard,
ends loosened once and never tied to anyone or anything
we float along these shadows,
and the work is never done.

Went to the bayou to see the trees,
what they had to say to my silence
Reaching out above the sky,
scraping dark clouds and sunbeams with equal abandon
shading bayou waters, catching bodies and other debris
wrapping round the trunks muddy and dark
fashioning it to something useful
like a poem?
It's mystery we prefer to truth.

Watching waters of the bayou brown and fast
thinking what?
fancy pictures of trees on bottles
that sell the wine, drunk beyond care
subtle foil labels, stark tree
outlines, anorexic skeletons
black and white photos of lonely, shapely trees,
called art
trees of character
trees of lynchings, crucifixions
their limbs beat others limbs
still
no one questions, no one doubts
the trees character