How to write a Poem about a Tree

By Paul Curry

a poem about poetry about a tree

Like you, no one told me
the trick. You can’t write about a tree unless you’re in its shade.

A good one anyway. A true one anyway.

Follies.
Flights of Fancy.
the Heights, the Depths, of Holy Humanity— All of it, and us, and more

can be described inside, sans sky, behind strong locked closed doors.

Even our best, our only, our odes to unrelenting love can be written safely

on the bus in your head or boozed up in bed.

But a mountain bends for no man,
and neither do its words
and the sound of saccades can’t be summoned up to New York

no matter how much absinthe you drink,

all the different greens become one when we look away. You can’t hear the wind dance through plants in your head and photons in flight don’t light creations colors on fire

in your mind’s eye— at least not quite the same way.

Until today,
I thought nature was a muse meant
for the most natural among us, now I see.
I had to be swimming in it to put a drop on a page.

Still, somehow still
as ineffable as the life that she made.

You can’t write about a tree unless you’re in its shade—

and even then.