Trees

Are trees bodies? Or merely nerve synapses, sky sutures, marshy river deltas with no defined geographical boundaries where night flows into day? Portals between dimensions? In the roots of the elm, earth plants her feet, reaches upward to the sky. In its leaves, the sky palpates with tender fingers the mortal flesh of the beloved, showers the earth with gifts of light and rain. There are no “trees,” only the wedding feast of the marriage of heaven and earth.

Lords and ladies in attendance. Vertumnus and Pomona. Vertumnus has sturdy limbs, split, crackled seams under his knees and smooth, silver, livid-blotchy bark with assorted lesions, knots, burls, cankers, butt swell and minor girdling at the soil line caused by root weevils. Pomona is graceful-limbed, purple-shaded, polished  bronze, with tarnished bosses, light verdigris and a speckled bole. Ruddy-skinned pamplemousses glow like orbed lanterns in the glade. Amid the darkness at the center of the fruittree, the lemon glow of unblinking gapefruit (grapefruit). Wedding in the orchard. Lords and ladies in attendance. Pre-school flower girls in festive leaf, dressed in orange blossom cambric. Tall willowy bridesmaids in peachskin satin sway over the assembled throng, the verdant multitude of earthly foliage.