Cottonwood

Cottonwood man where do you stand

with your hair in the wind and your feet in the sand

with fish in your toes with birds in your ear

where nobody goes where nobody knows

where the dark stream flows

 through no man's land

Cottonwood

Like the cottonwood you blew

your living mess, a million white

flying buckyballs of seed

into the surburbanality of my lawn draped yard.

Your tall form housed a hundred manically

singing alarm clocks, beaks gaping,

and that chorus of night-moaning frogs

on the dark star shift gave tongue after tongue.

The clamorous rustle of your pale olive leaves

skinkissed air with every thrust of the wind.

Your probing taproot unsettled my foundation

while the squirming mass of your surface roots

shallow-swarmed the murmuring soil, tattooing

themselves on the soul of my shell, invasive grey

capillaries spreading and knotting

in a madman's macrame of satiated nerves.

Though the sharp chainsaw won, still I feel

those pliant root hairs stir and sigh, insinuating with

springing suckers an evergreen life in your shade.

Still, even in October

haunting the odd corner

I find a fluff of seed.

~October 2012

 

Posted for   OpenLinkNight   at dVerse Poets Pub

Process Notes: I have used the term buckyballs, a form of fullerene with 60 carbon atoms arranged in a spherical shape, loosely here.
sucker — n
...7.     botany
     a. a strong shoot that arises in a mature plant from a root, rhizome, or the base of the main stem
     b. a short branch of a parasitic plant that absorbs nutrients from the host 
~World Dictionary

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cottonwood by Hedgewitch O'theWilds

 

Header Image: Cottonwood Ghost, by kern.justin, on flick'r
Footer Image: Cottonwood bursting out, by blmurch, on flick'r

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