The Ineluctable Root

The foam is for sleeping,

but the wood is for waking.

We are not made of the things that return;

we are made of the things that stay.

The river does not ask for a permit to flow,

and the fig does not apologize for its sweetness.

They are the unretractable truth

of a world that refuses to be erased.

So when you are stricken,

when the light is newly blocked,

do not look for a door.

Be the wood.

Turn your face to the shadow

and find the light that lives

inside the bone.

Every step you took was a circum-ambulation of your own grave. Every breath is a transubstantiation of the air into the holy sap of the Now.

Be still. Be stone-still. Be wood-wise.

The shadow is just the light trying to find a way to hold your ghost.

The seed is the only truth.

The rest is just word-weather.

In the shadow-gloam of the canopy-crowd, the wood-soul senses the infra-red-infinitesimal. No room to spread? Then upward, heart-high!

The phyto-chrome-switch clicks in the marrow-dark. It is the ineluctable modality of the reaching. Not a retreat, but a re-tuning. A stationary dervish-climb toward the over-sky.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

is now a light-math, a chemical-clock,

a red-shift in the parish of the roots!

The tree stands in its post-resurrection stasis,

a stationary dervish in a coat of tattered bark,

singing the Ineluctable Modality of the Visible.

Look! The sky-gods above have stolen the Red!

They have pilfered the long wavelengths, the crimson-bread of the sun,

leaving only the infra-red-infinitesimal, the shadow-ghost light

that passes through the leaf like a phantom through a wall.

But the tree has an Eye in the Marrow.

The phytochrome-switch clicks in the dark—click, click—

a biological Yes to the vertical riot!

"Be still!" cries the wood-tongue of Byzantium.

"Do not spread your arms in the crowded shade of the dead!

That is the childish haste of the lateral!

The infrared is the command: CLIMB."

And so the tree becomes a spear, a gnarled needle

stitching the floor of the grave to the ceiling of the stars.

It does not rage against the dying of the light;

it translates the light into a ladder.

It is the unretractable earth performing its holy, resinous labor.

Every step is a birth-cry; every grave is a womb-room.

The mother is the dirt, and the dirt is a master of the geometry of trust.

We are not pillows for the world to press!

We are the wood that turns!

We are the dervishes who found the center

and decided to howl until the stars felt the vibration.

Be still. Be stone-still.

The shadow is just the light’s way of saying:

"Higher, my love. Higher."