My yellow utterly incarnate tree bends to the wind,
trailing its leaves, like the wake of a trawler, across the glass
in the wall at the head of my bed.
A sunlit dress with a pale green fringe,
and narrow, deep-red veins,
drifts from a hanger on a rack of clothes
behind your name,
haunting the still air near my memories,
flirting the billowed breeze
beside my hopes.
My rising summer heart
and daybreak eyes
twist
into the fabric lines,
fingering knots
against the sight of naked limbs
reaching out to the wind,
answering the wind:
a dry and ceaseless rustling--
the planks of a canoe scraping against
the riverbed stones
in a spring drought.
My yellow utterly incarnate tree,
unravelling its solemn bough,
splashes its dress across the wall
and spreads a tide of dew before my dreams,
unclothes my dreams with names,
whets the abandoned channel of my thirsting dreams,
disturbs the sleep of the canoe
on the riverbed stones of that distant spring.
