Tree, and Trunk, and Stump

Tree: 
Her Trunk, Her Stump

Stationed the way she is and taking on

time like it's tipped to the side, see how
the water slides by her, pulled by time
and tide in the wide eyed glide of the quiet

and pacifying night?  Eyes, see: they are: tree,

finally deleafed, having been seized
from the up-river come undone liquid frieze; 

see: the thick then thin cartography received 

beneath a once fizzy August heat, now a greeting

gummed on the trunk, limbs quit, and dead 

up the stump, like some lumberjack chopping 

to audition a Jesus tree, and in a meeting sees
the squeeze and releases the whole scene
swing by swing by swing, whetting the head
of the ax every ten connections.  It's his particular

routine.  And even though I’m the only one seeing

that ease, the tree’s definitely been a long-time
free of her roots and kin and maybe
months and maybe years ago.  She holds only
to the dried mud and rush (if the man who owns

the dam water rights is watching the jet
stream spots it).  Like she's stationed here
briefly, detritus freeze, and plugged, and has no 

needs, just this pause and pause through brutal
afternoons and early season frosts, all

that water washing her, letting her go.  Today,
with things being as they are, she's stuck
longer than she might have been, and her
calm and haunting top coming to be her copy
against the river water,  she is two gazes:

not Janus exactly, see the one face is not
solid at all but still it is caught, it is the same

as if it is severing itself on the water, taunting

a want from me to be both as secretive, as trans-
parent:  my daughter watches as I crawl

unceremoniously down the mud-gucked bank

to get in on the right edges for the perfect
angle.  I hold my camera above my head
as if I were going to cross the whole river
and slip slideways trying for the right

frame.  I’m as stuck at one point as the dead

tree eyeing me: I see some of what I need to keep me
standing and take it with me in my hand,
grab the grass without looking back.  I didn’t fall

this time, but when I’m home and the image

grows slow as a Polaroid, I see a sunk

thing, finally coming up, and it’s not

the tree or trunk or sawn-off gawk

of the heartwood.  I see an owl, don’t you? wide-

eyed?  And I’m prey too, I know I am, coming

undone, coming to an end that is always

ending, or beginning that is always beginning,
distant and reflective as this body of water,
insisting, insisting, my limited shifting: who?
who?  This way a saw-whet, this way a barred,

closer, come, a horned.  Though if I incorporate 

the limbs, and if, like you see deer, the rack 

is an aged buck.  Still, in the end, it's the sweep 

of wings, feather or bone, once
winter is on, seem tipped sideways in flight,

alight on the snow of its own self, holding,
holding.