Ton-glen:

Ton-glen:

Breathe in for all of us and breathe out for all of us.

            Use what seems like poison as medicine.

                                                                                Pema Chodron

That winter I’d only seen her from the road,
and because I was never able

to stop and walk up to her, to touch the trunk of her

underneath, the lungs of her canopy, to, palm on skin,

lift something of her up from the root, something

long mulched, something to revere, something to heal
that bored hostility of boys and girls who
had swashbuckled their childhood into any branch
they could climb, ravish, hide, stamp on
the pounded log-cabin dirt floor.  She's clean,
beneath the sky, plain in her aproned placard
and fauld, high above my head.
I need just a moment, please, a banyan moment
you know, like the Buddha beneath his own.
She'll stand for it, suffer it all along and all the way

through, like the others, who, cutting into her,
rake their dates and arrows and fates, 

purloining their name in cutaway layers
troughed swaths of thick tegument
while all that came away drifted into the over-

arching leaves of her canopy and past.
And how her sprigs and twigs:

see? they seem thrown over her neck

decades of being bent into the weather.  I mouth
letter after letter, tip my head to the some
higher up than I can reach or even see the first day

I finally arrive.  Was the climb for them entirely

belly to the branch, secreted by

her leaves while the cutting makes some
of her come undone.  I wonder about that one
carving up over my head from the someone
with enough loneliness to pull away from the party,
or to go up out of the picnic they’d come to in the park,
how they get away from some annual obligation
and let themselves stray deep into the ancient
inhale and for a small while lay

prostrate, the whole length of them must’ve been

in the arm-crook of the tree.  And isn’t she then,

holding herself out like that and in utter
vulnerability, a mother such who takes up the child
where the birth mother had let go, who soothes
the deep breathing bruise of insults under the scalp,
beneath the ribs?  And doesn’t she relate to these
hieroglyphs and pull them out into her own

skin now branded by the child

whose life she may have saved just then staying
right where she was while he laid into her and shaved
layer after layer of her away, making his name,
what no one can see unless they’re beneath it,
unless they look up, and of course only when

when it’s not raining and only when the sun isn’t noon
straight overhead and demanding a hand over its face

and maybe not even then, maybe

like the boy long gone now and God knows where or if

he’s still alive (or even if it were a boy…) because she is still

silent, poised, thin in places, touched, watched

all through the seasons, but finally, come up to

early spring, astonishingly, being so sacred, receptive,

taking me in, kind.