Death is the center of compromised bark.
We see the stark night,
not as beauty sprawled on frozen ground,
surrounded by the winter of burly December,
but within the silence of that territory,
of that splendid ending of breath -
that is what we, in quiet awe, absorb.
We hear what is the seizure of sound;
the prolific atoms - the mute, unmoving atoms,
the aerodynamic seeds supporting birth.
Bruised by impact is the illness of us all,
the rings in our bodies used to count the ages,
the years diffused by the quality of eyes, the sheer
power of branches, prone instead of reaching
where we reach when the earth turns its back.
It is a wooded picture: a stern demise.
It sleeps within the impression of stone,
hiding only the doppelganger of squirrels.
The purpose leans into grass. The limbs
of the world cry for the limbs of a burg;
they accept certain depths, as a god is touched.
Lamont Palmer (Lamont Palmer)
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/fallen-tree/
