Iron Tree

Iron Tree

High summer, long summer.
Dead grass skittled over.
The wind comes crashing into an oak tree—
a big oak, thick oak, made of iron.
I hear the stiff clatter of a woodpigeon,
breaking from the crown.
That disharmony
takes my mind to the city.
Liverpool Street Station in a rush hour stampede.
It’s the union of dreams.
Together we create the impossible life;
together our inner worlds leak outwards.
We are all fathers, mothers, drunks, bankers, painters,
joined together in holy urban matrimony.
Wedded strangers
in this sacred city,
with its brilliant collusions of brick and man, and cloud and kerb,
the sudden breezes at the mouth of tube stations,
a bottle of IPA in a cobbled mews.
It’s a party in full swing, always in full swing.
If you reflect, you’ll surely remember:
you can’t visit the city; you can only be the city.

I am here with Iron Tree, in the fawn kingdom of an endless summer.
Above a cloud of crinkly leaves mingling with the byways of breeze,
a pure white dove trickles down a water trough.
Sheep begin to nibble at young apples.
Horses watch tiny frames of life—
like fragments of hoof and ant and flint.
The sunset orchard drowns in a pool of its own nostalgia.

Iron Tree waits by the road that leads to the city,
apparently touched by city ways,
with a birthday balloon entangled in the upper weave.

A quiver in the crown speaks of a heart in the trunk,
with the green blood of Mother Earth
pumping out along the branches,
across the dry, withering moss on the barn roof,
to the soundless holly down the lane,
through fallow fields and villages in gentle ruin,
beyond what a beady eye can easily fathom—
up there in the garden of unseen stars,
beyond the endless sprawl
of a black nothing and
back here again,
in the barky,
leafy wonder
of it all.