Philosophical Shrubbery

Alchemists, Jung, astrobiologists,
And Hokkaido tourists all have their trees
Suggestive to them of philosophy,

Whether it’s the philosopher who grows
A mineral pillar shaped like a tree
Or the tree that seems philosophical.

Whichever direction figuration
Flows, doesn’t matter to us in these lines.
We’re more intrigued by the irrigation,

The way beings of densely dendritic
Forests in their skulls water parallels
Not only through actual, branching woods,

But in any branchlike pattern, from thoughts
To life, to ice crystals and minerals.
Ordinary trees are in the middle

Of these exchanges, appropriately
Enough, since they also serve as figures
For how this middle world is organized.

We scamper about in the shrubbery,
Segmented centipedes and snaking lines,
Consuming the compost of the fallen

Branches and layers on layers of leaves,
Occasionally whole giants brought down
To our level like dendritic whalefall.

For us, this is beauty, the broken heaps
Of branching patterns that reached for heaven,
When heaven turned out to be just as thin

As the layers of crust, as the ocean.
Oh, it goes deep, up there, it goes so deep.
But unless you nominate spiral arms

On occasional galaxies as trees,
The heavens full of waves are less like woods,
More like what’s seen on the floor of the sea.

What if the universe isn’t cut out
For much figurative philosophy?
All your trees may be rare delicacies.