My Tree

A trick of light that only happens in autumn, late autumn, sets this tree on fire, every afternoon as I get in my car to head home. The sunlight completely ignores the other trees and hits only this one with it’s high beams.

It is good to pause and stand in utter awe after the day bruises us with it’s ridiculously tiny fists. It is good to stand transfixed in light and color, shaking like branches off the frustrations that make life so beautiful and so silly. Shedding the little things we shouldn’t worry about: Those shattered pieces we pick up every day; those streaks of color that fall just outside our vision; the stuff we can’t keep intact and shouldn’t try. The things we cling to, hold up, compare, rename, classify, judge and collect.

Today, even against the stark snowy backdrop, the tree looked cement gray.  I am reminded of Bukowski and Hinton and the reality of magic.

This is Just Killing Me.

This little excerpt I’m sure I read before is gnawing at me. It is a good chew, a necessary function of thought, the slow grinding of guts and gears; the spark of synaptical leaps. It is stuck in my skull, like the simple sentence written on a torn piece of paper I found in the computer lab yesterday,
“I remember Kayla Combs.”
It sang me to sleep and sang me awake. And these leaves of Whitman’s, veined with color and common as dirt repeat and fold at the back of my eyes. When I read it aloud for my parents, my dad grumbled and left the room. I will never sing, “I remember Kayla Combs” for him. He would never understand.

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.