Friday, September 11, 2009: Quoted from: cow_birch_with_barred_owls.jpg 500×666 pixels

Birches

Birches stir the imagination.
They peel and reveal

Rough black patches
And strips, deconstructed

Bar codes and inky
Clawmarks. Slim-trunked,

Skin pale as bone,
These birches lean out

From the ground.
They are vulnerable

And weird, and so we
Make them into other

Forms: kneeling girls
With hair flung forward,

Ladders, knobby horse legs.
They bend and stretch

Under the weight of our vision,
Intangible, strong as a breeze.