A Walk in the Woods

I pinched this poem from my website. I had intended to include it with yesterday's image, which is where it really belongs, but then thought that I didn't want to take the focus from the Ghazals.

---

The leaves move in the wind -
or moving leaves create the wind.
Mysterious, the wood through which I walk,
and hung with possibilities I thought
we had resolved in childhood.

A greenness, as of ocean,
overwhelms; its weight makes
dizzy, twangs the brambles round the feet, entwined
like broken cello strings. If trees were people
we would call them bullies, yet they wait,

patient as the mist above the pond
and like a million fibres hung
with stars, as though a million
spiders had a million thoughts
and could not stay with one.

We look for stasis, but the spiders know
the world is built on motion, they are one
with it, their webs are sexual, are moments
of completion, their only absolutes -
in moments torn to pieces.

Each ecstasy brings forth another
like itself. Beyond life hangs life's image
in another web. Between the roots
and canopy the trunks impose
their discipline, a regularity

of space and form. Things follow things,
there are no final moments, final states.
Mysterious the wood, and hung
with possibilities. And yet, and yet
we cannot move without the web is torn.