The moon’s watching

Winter Trees

Earlier this evening I spied on the moon through the branches of the huge Maple tree in our yard. Now, when I’m here at my desk, wondering what on earth to write about, the moon is spying on me (M told me so just a minute ago).

What can I possibly write that the moon hasn’t already read?

What can I do but describe the cold blue-black night, the dying glow of the fires, the dogs lying like moored boats in a moonlit harbor, another load of dirty dishes piled in the sink, the stereo playing some piece of music I feel I know but can’t name, the moon sailing her orbit while we sail ours, the end of the day.

Same old story, says the moon in a comforting way. Time to turn out the lights, pull the night up to your chin, feel quiet and planted, like a Maple tree on a November night.

Winter Trees

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

–William Carlos Williams

52 Photos ~ Light and dark

Tree for forest

The Forest at the Edge of the World

Today I left groceries by the playground on Hudson
and tried to haul, up toward my block,
a cross section of a maple grown too large,
chainsawed into manhole covers. Alphonso,
Super for All Buildings east of the projects,
stopped sweeping. He leaned his bald broom
against the stoop, nudged the wood with his toe.
“Nothing to do but roll it,” he said, hands
deep in his pockets. I nodded,
barely believing my luck in the midst of asphalt,
transistor radios, and the wet smell of dogs
as he squatted eye level with the log, heaved it
against his shoulder like a man who bears
a handmade cross for miles on his penitent back.
I saw a kind of glory in his eyes, he understood
the heft of the trunk, nicks in the damp bark.
I stood on the side and righted the thing
and together we rolled this boulder of tree
past the Indian deli, the Russian shoe repair,
the Caribbean bakery. “You can smell the forest,”
he said, as we reached my stoop, wood
in the crook of his neck, sawdust and humus and sweat.
And we hoisted the thing, one step at a time, stopping
only to breathe the scent of sap and after a good half hour
it was filling the whole of my apartment—
the shade, the damp smell, that enormous presence—
light brown rings so perfect my whole life
fell right down inside them, concentric circles,
tree within tree, the single slab a world within itself—
suddenly it was thirty-five years ago:
I stood on the edge of a forest, someplace upstate,
and looked up into the branches of my first
true and majestic tree, in the first real forest—trees
instead of buildings. Oh the breadth of those limbs—
after the taut geometry of elevator, fire escape, lobby,
to see through branches to the sun—I believed
the world was mine, there was sap in my veins,
the tree was limitless, the scent of the tree,
the bark and the branch and the six-year-old sightline,
which goes on to the edge of the known world.

–By Rynn Williams, from Adonis Garage. Copyright © 2005 by Rynn Williams

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This photo and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

52 Weeks ~ Flash Photo (50/52)

RSiegel_Week50 - Moonless maple tree

Barn

Apple tree

Maple branches

We Grow Accustomed to the Dark

We grow accustomed to the Dark —
When light is put away —
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye —

A Moment — We uncertain step
For newness of the night —
Then — fit our Vision to the Dark —
And meet the Road — erect —

And so of larger — Darkness —
Those Evenings of the Brain —
When not a Moon disclose a sign —
Or Star — come out — within —

The Bravest — grope a little —
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead —
But as they learn to see —

Either the Darkness alters —
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight —
And Life steps almost straight.

–Emily Dickinson