Drawing Blood

Our woods in summer are so rife
With stigmas, styles, and stalks; life
So stylized and lush, before widespread ice

Can cancel calyx, bract, and fruit,
Stalk the parachute-like silk of root
And bud alike, before humble morning dew,

With frost’s enigma, compounds the bone-white
Skeleton of spring in whorls of saprophytes
And snow – that, in between the prism of the light

And moving shadows of the leaves, I miss
The deeper pages of the brush,
Like a child who in the rush to finish
Reads the last line first,

Drawing blood directly when, reading
Backwards, he uncovers the beginning
Of the plot, the forest's seedling

Vein revealed, from which a nurse,
White-suited, has transferred in reverse
The understory of the verse,

So that in winter, when meanings leech
From the body of the beech,
Eyes by artful instinct reach

Innately to the last part,
Allowing even novices to chart
Where the ends of nature start.

February 1st, 1986, Bedford
September 24th, 2023, Tippet Rise