STICKS

Are the tree’s sprout, but the wind’s gift.

I choose the straightest among what I pluck

from the briars 

  or the shade by the ditch;

hip-height and thumb-thick and bone-strong.

I won’t take one too gluey with resin.

I won’t take one too old and too parched and too likely to crack.

A whorling gnarl 

half a hand 

from the thick end 

will give a 

good grip.

There is one imperative. Presumably it’s God’s. 

Or the sky’s 

        or the bog’s 

    or the wind’s.

The wind is the voice of the sky saying this:

A branch is not a stick 

and snapping off a healthy branch 

will draw a heavy curse on life.

What and where cannot be said.

A healthy branch is a well of dread.

Still, ancient impulse leans to the perfect bond of a stick. 

I feel a far ancestral honouring.

I shake the stick above my head and yawp like Eve,

yawp like Rousseau, yawp as beardy Whitman did.

        and rise               and rise

I fall and fall 

and twist in my own yawping stick-dance,

spiralling to archetypal dreamtime,

to distant eidolons of human wilderness; 

a million years old and unexpelled, 

not yet parted from the forest...

....romantic guff, 

paint and fumes to cheat my guilt, deny reality.

For God is only living-life, and when I was eight I tortured God,

tormented animals, hacked at sapping wood.

At eight a boy’s already part of teak,

already animated by his stick;

his spear, 

      his wand, 

his staff, 

  his rod.

Each battling phantom in his DNA

still grasping through the aeons 

at this multi-purpose limb,

this cable routing him 

through instant ages up

to modern man,

to man who’d slash a path through anything,

to man who stands back to probe 

without touching,

to man who handles the world 

without feeling, 

to man by which the hacked tree sows

its Amazon of grief,

to man by which the numb roots spread

colonising every nerve and tip. 

I am man now, and I’m getting a grip.