Sunday Poetry LI -- "An Arboreal Fairtytale," by UGn X

There are few pieces of writing—very few—that I’ve both produced myself and of which I’m particularly proud.  This is one of them, and I expect that no one will ever really get it.  And that’s just fine (and that’s no commentary on your certainly shrewd aptitude for poetry interpretation, but commentary on my own poetics).  There’s an awful lot of truth to the notion that poets (dare I qualify myself as one of them? —maybe “artist” is safer, less specific, right?) write as much for themselves as anyone else, if not entirely for themselves and no one else.  I can’t say that that’s entirely the case here, as this is one of many poems I wrote for a novel I’m featuring over on one of my other blogs (and, you may have already noticed, I’m leaving in place the attributive eponym for the “actual” angst-ridden composer, Eugene Cross (get it??)).  It’s also, like I said, one of my very favorite poems.  It was tremendously fun to write—to piece together, really—and, apart from acknowledging off some of my favorite artists and themes, plays to all the stuff I love best about my poetry—or, at least, about my favorite poems.  Is it successful?  Yeah.  Very.  After all, I wrote it for myself (well, and for Eugene Cross), and I love it!  Of course, that begs the question, then, Why am I bothering to put it here, particularly out of the context of its novel home?  Because I’ve got nothing else I want to share for Sunday Poetry today, and I’ve always wanted this one to be more out there than, well, you know, just being “out there.”

So here it is.  I welcome, as always, you thoughts, whatever they happen to be. 

An Arboreal Fairytale and Moral in Three and a Half Stanzas

On a Caravaggio plateau, under

               black and red skies: desolate and shadowed;

               naked, exposed, the stunted stem, naught but

               an arthritic claw, clutches dark feathers;

vibrant Rackham verdure—slight, sketchy, lush—

               unwittingly hosts the agonized stick:

               cowering ill-confidence, faithless and

               grasping, desperate in its green innocence;

Remedios Varo woods are sharp and

               thick and heavy under a sky swirling

               with physics.  Thin, difficult; stretch! just not

               sufficient in the great grand majestic;

               a Basho workbench

               supports the potted leaf tree:

elegant

for its crooks and folds.

—UGn X