My Heart Is Stretching

 

My Heart Is Stretching

 

And Yesterday, I felt my it

stretch the long way --

base to apex -- and likened it

to an Arbor

            vitae.  Elon-

                        gated, I saw

a tall thin oak and I didn’t know

what I was looking at

at first.  Noon, so no shadow.  Turns

out they call it

                        a Columnar English Oak.

Or toward Linnaeus:

Quercus robur Fastigita

Rooted in the, if you’re facing it

and the mountain’s in front of you too,

the northwest corner of the community

garden.  How drawn,

which is to say how stretched toward

or simply just growing into

                        the way all trees do

the sky from the top

of the ground (does nothing touch

the earth so much as the sky

wondered while I walked the small

circumference of the trunk)

and I also thought: I want to be

 

this kind of tree, with its lengthy

acorn eventually extending out from the neck ruff

it is enscarfed in,

every beam of heat her own

intimacy, which is to say this: it is elongated

pain, which is to say this:

a heartbeat’s unique signature's ecstasy

because ecstasy is pain that breaks us and makes us

glad.

 

Like when the branch of a tree

springs in one's periphery

just that single particular branch

and it's missed, the thing that made it leap up

like that but it's sensed it wasn’t the wind

that it was something that departed

before the arrival.  The kind

of grief that creates a splitting…