Member Poem

When love's cruel fever batters and bends,
Reducing scorched hearts to wretched tinder,
This arboreal temple its solace extends -
A sanctum where injured souls may recover.
The pines raise their arms in an ancient, mossed embrace,
Offering green absolution for amorous crimes.
Below their phloemic wings lies a hallowed space
To convalesce from passion's unpardoning climes.
Here let me cloister amid these chainless trees,
Unburdened of hoary conformities,
No demands, no chokeholds, just silence to please
My bedraggled spirit with verdant amnesty.
I'll slough the ill-fitted skin of betrayed believer
And gentle these wendigo desires, this cankered lack,
Until the anodyne of sap and soil releases
The fecundities trampled on love's feral track.
The breeze courses its fingered caresses,
Like some uncaged faerie grazing my consciousness,
Laving away the porcine residues of reckless men,
Bestowing the balm only wilderness can summon.
In this verdant fever-den I'll tart myself
From the crippling diseases society's leeched,
Razing the rickstands, the mockeries of health
Until my feral goddess-loans are rebirthed, bequeathed.
Unsheathed from the serf-swaddles of dolors, unheavings -
Let me be revolving with only these tree-remedies,
Spinning anew on the leylines of arboreal weavings
Replenished, refounded in groves of my chosen urgencies.
voice lowers to a murmur
When at last the metamorphics made measureless whole,
I'll either emerge from this chrysalis unblemished and bright...
Or curl into these roots forever, an evanesced soul
Delivered from Eros' heroic, relentless plight.
voice grows hushed, solemn yet lyrical
The Tangled Wildings
Within these bracken'd thickets and tumbling vines,
Beribboned with last light's buttery traces,
She retraces the snarled path, the wayward signs
That bind her to that absence, her babe's fae face.
Across the Ur-knot roots and crumbled bark,
Her searching hands skim each crafted nook and den,
Trailing the numinous threads that yet spark
With downy memorials of the life lived, unlived then.
Her palms frond the loamy shoals of these tangled wilds,
Sifting the shifting tapestry, needled and frayed,
For any specks, any glints that may yield
Some guidemark illumining where last his small self waded.
Amid the winnowed verdancies sifting and swaying,
Each vagrant leaf seems to clutch some forgotten prize,
Some cherished doll or bauble gone mislaid, misplaying -
Igniting wild embers to blaze behind her eyes.
Could that fowl-freckled fern be a footstep's imprint?
Might those scattered, chaffed petals trail his wandering way?
Her wrecked gaze scans every knot, every inscrutable hint,
Discerning no difference 'twixt dream and decayed day.

She pores and plumbs each coiled knot and boscaged path,
Each twig-rutted recess or mist-silvered branch,
Desperate to reclaim what life so blithely ran'sacks -
One resplendently ruinous, mothergrief trance.
For whether amid the splatters of wildflower and fern,
Or lost in some time-lapse of gloaming and must,
Something of him, his dear thistle-hooded form, still burns
Deep in these woods - if she could but part the green dust.
voice lowers further, awash in melancholy
So on she crouches, foraged in these verdant wakes,
Raveling each thread of the embryonic tales they still spin...
Hoping, yet knowing no wild finality slakes
The viscid yearnings of her instincts' tangled kin.