Number 62

 Tree

You tree

of company--

here

shadowed branches,

small,

twisted comfortably

your size,

reddish buds' clusters--

all of

you I love

here

by the simple river.

Robert Creeley, "Tree" from Windows (New York:

New Directions, 1990), p. 13.  

Number 61

 

Recently my next-door friend got a new computer and consequently bestowed on me her older one--so now I have my own email address.  Gary and I immediately began corresponding from room to room, which gives us both much pleasure. 

Yesterday, when I looked at my messages, I found this from Gary about his current reading in the works of Emile Zola (specifically, The Masterpiece): " If anyone should ask why I read Zola (and nobody will)," he wrote to me, "I'd point to writing like this:  "...Willows, along both river-banks, trailed their pale heads in their own reflections."

Gary tells me that he simply didn't expect such lyricism from so committed a naturalist writer as Zola..

Number 60

 

Yesterday evening

I returned with the clouds

drifting under the rosebushes

(great, round tenderness)

among the faithful tree trunks.

The solitude was eternal

and the silence never-ending.

I stood still like a tree

and listened to trees talking.

From "Men Trees" in Three Hundred Poems, 1903-1953, by Juan Ramon Jimenez (Austin:

University of Texas Press, n.d.), p. 201 

Number 59

 

A tree

like a rose

can reclothe

a threadbare soul