Forget the tube of bark,
Alliterative leaves,
Tenacious like a hand,
Gnarled rootage in the dark
Interior of land.
Bright incidental bird
Whose melody is fanned
Among the bundled sheaves,
Wild spool of the winding word,
Reject: and let there be
Only tree.
--From Stanley Kunitz, "Very Tree" in The Collected Poems (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000), p. 31.
