trees 2

One among the crowd is held against an idea of the sky.
I watch—the way you don't quite watch a sibling,
its presence and its placing; something about its branching
balanced growth. I watch until the light gives out.
Darkness takes it swiftly then, just as it took my brother,
and no amount of calling is going to bring it back.
I'm stretching it—I know that all you get with trees is
'seems'. But there are times when night, with its built-in
recurrence, its ghostly passing presence, becomes the setting
for an antique apprehension—the passage of the soul.