<< Back to Dale's poetry
<< Back to "13 ways of looking at a tree in the style of Wallace Stevens" poems

1

Winter trees fracture the sky like
Shattered windscreens;
Or like
Stained glass.

2

The willow tree outside my bedroom window
Is a tenement for the rural poor: squabbling collared doves
And acrobatic squirrels,
Lives laid bare in winter, decently veiled in spring.

3

Our birch trees in autumn: twin candle flames,
Enormous,
And two weeks in the burning.

4

They pollarded the avenue of trees – arthritic hands,
Crippled, clutching, broken.
Yet new fingers spring from
Each tortured node.

5

As I cut the trees of the broccoli, carefully separating the forest,
I think of Ghiberti’s baptistry doors
And their broccoli woods.

6

All trees are alike in summer; in autumn they catch fire at different rates,
And burn with varied flames;
In spring they turn a banal green.
Winter reveals their truest shapes,
And the colours of their branches can be seen.

7

The poplar lopped to put the fence up
In seven years has doubled height and grown
Once more into its proper shape and size.

8

Oaks flourish, quietly bearing full heads of leaves,
Pale brown, or pink, complete,
When those around them shiver, bald and bare.

9

Our tiny oak, in the corner of the garden,
Too small at first to be a tree,
Stands now, full leaved, and reaches out to pat
The humbled heads of lowly neighbour bushes.

10

In Norfolk hedges, farmers never cut
The oak;
So the winter landscape (plotted and pieced, fold fallow and plough)
Is marked by these sentinels, whose
Calligraphic curlicues are
Stamped on sky.

11

In March the hedges
From Boxworth to the A14
Seem all blackthorn,
Delicate white blossoms lining the lanes;
In April wild cherry and crab peep bravely through branches still bare;
In May it’s the may, hawthorn festooned
With lavish bridal gowns and veils flung out to dry;
And in June the pink eglantine has its brief flourishing.

12

Sloe and damson-
Deeply blue with a white bloom –
Like skies of the Italian Renaissance
Mocking the greyer hues of English autumn.

13

Every night of my childhood
The moon was entangled
In our backyard elms.

© Dale Mitchell, December 2006