THE WOMAN WHO WOULD DANCE
The woman who would dance on treetops;
who would walk with trees,
Tell me:
What is the shape and form and extent of the tree?
What is its roots, and what its height?
How can its girth be encompassed?
How can its wisdom be translated?
There is, you see, no merit in finding answers.
Answers are not how this, or any other, universe functions.
Multiply the questions.
Each a branch, each a root.
Questions. Spreading, holding,
Illuminating, transducing.
The word for tree
Is the word for truth,
And it is not one thing
Nor many.
To wrap it around an ankle,
A web around a bone, around skin
Around a scent, around a movement.
To wear a tree. To be worn,
Within and without.
Smiled upon, an ocean waved and rippled.
To be cast out upon a twig,
Without a name,
In a bag with no name,
In a basket with no name.
To forget one name, a touch of light,
A trembling on starlight,
A passage between attractors.
Begin and continue:
That is a tree.
An umbrella to worlds
A clamour of tongues
Green and cymbal-sharp,
Their little edges are questions.
To find an image
One must not seek an image,
(we need no other backwards mirror things),
To scribble and allow the dust
To coagulate, drip and remember
That all the waters of the world
Are one river.
The slightest, remotest puddle,
Slowly drawn upward, freedom
Within gravity to become cloud,
The tiniest thing, the thing most free,
Falling with accumulation,
Flowing with urgent weight,
Becoming all else by need.
A fountain of water held upright
By the will of the sun.
An urge to delve darkness,
To send out messengers,
To converse with all the syllables of scent.
This becomes another tree, so you see.
A one, a self, a many, a one.
Passionately, she wishes to become inscribed,
Pictured, illuminated, to become aligned,
Limned, re-limbed.
Chosen, loosed, re-booted,
A future unveiled, woven around.
The past taken up, enthroned
And unfolded. Truth made real
In arching bough, the only dance there is,
A bounce up and out from ground
And a certain, graceful, impossibly slow
Decline.
