atop what the arborist calls unhealable wound. I need to slip this tree inside myself: crystallize its images into words which, if never made real, are still reproducible. What purpose, otherwise, is grief? Otherwise why watch this tree wither to ground, why follow it to its final abandonment? Here is my small replenishing: each year making the flowers in mind more vibrant, plentiful. It feeds some kind of denial, yes, but without which no past, no future left to choose from. The tree inside me grows. I hold its thousand tongues, thousand fires alight. They will never burn you, no— though no
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