Liberties

American linden also American lime of the family Basswood (tiliaceae un- pronounceable virtually for this layman) but mine opposite keeps that quiet and presents facts as they appear – being a handsome street-shade tree with elephant bark in hard scaly ridges and russet twigs wandering into green until, when flowering, it fills with bees giving a murmurous but once heard un- ignorable oozing Spring song to show the tree knew what its name was all along. * This morning everything I need to know the tree can tell me. Its stillness is perfect stillness. Its movement when wind blows is the dance of a soul before God. Think what a story I would miss if ever I looked away. The text of beauty. A late chance gone of boring a hole in my own skull and seeing what I imagine next. * Delicate still in its breezy morning the tree I now want to know as ‘her’ with those fine swizzle-stick twitches. She is playing the part of Summer, flouncing her feathery evening boa and catching the eye of her paramour: me, in the frame of my window, watching to see if a rival appears in the black silk net of her shadow. * Loving a thing I know is when a becomes the. The tree in view I know is what I love to see. * One night and then for a week after a large green heron with no idea of the right and wrong place to live takes up residence in her branches. Only occasional eyes passing below look up and notice; mostly they see a heavy white shit-trail and assume that fell by magic out of nowhere. Eventually I realize my duty here is to grasp things as they appear, and see the puzzle is not