A WRITTEN WORD is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. —Henry David Thoreau

My first professional writing gig was as a feature writer for the Caribous Gnus, a newsletter devoted to Colorado’s short-lived professional soccer team The Colorado Caribous — voted worst soccer uniform ever with a strip of leather fringe across the chest!

Since then I’ve written everything from Supreme Court briefs to newsletters, employee policy manuals, and youth sports league handbooks. While my creative writing focus has always been writing poetry and essays, I’m currently working on a memoir that brings together many threads of my childhood growing up in a large family that was revered in the community, yet could feel crushing in its recesses. 

My most recent art show, titled Taller Than The Trees, was anchored by this poem.

leafing/leaving

dancing green against stony black bark

each leaf twirling counter to the other

sunglow coming through single layers at dawn

shadows where I lay awake near my lover

zenithal light in between spaces of dark

The first thing I see when the new day is barely here

My oak tree, familiar though this place is not

The sun ricochets through its boughs calling to me

be free and seek the luminous sky, unlearn what you’ve been taught

shed your skin, loosen your fear, allow the light to draw near

This impossibly imposing tree, yet not the biggest on these lands,

has ebony skeleton arms reaching to my window at night

Its trunk giant and gnarly from growing close to the big house

leaning toward the beach with a yen to take flight

each leaf trembling like a thousand waving hands

Have I projected too much onto the old tree

Can it come to me at night, yearn, gesture, or fly away

Firmly rooted, it will be here another hundred years before it falls

when I will be long gone, back to Colorado to stay

or maybe some other place to die or lose my heart or be

I dream of trees and discover them unintended in my paintings

Poems too are filled with branches, leaves and greens

Made of a fallen pine tree found floating in the shallows of the sea,

my new sculpture of the changed past and future forest leans

heavy on my heart affirming the vagaries of nature and human taintings

Pulling damp sheets over my bare arms this stormy night

hard rain on the roof drowns out the wind-in-the-tree whisper

The branches are thrown back and forth, rushing water floods the eaves

Paper-thin leaves are stomped to the ground in a carpet of chloroplasti

Lightening skywrites gibberish on heaven’s walls beyond midnight

On the darkest nights my oak is graphite black against a starless sky

The moon is hidden by clouds, fog, the earth’s tilt, or its own retreat

The air still, not a single leaf in motion, nothing to tell me my tree is there

All of creation, except me, suspended against the night’s silent drumbeat

with eyes wide open to the heavens waiting for some word, nothing am I

today the leaves and branches are weaving

as a slight breeze lifts and twines each twig

the mammoth oak towers above my sunfilled window

singing, exalting the day and dancing its charmers’ jig

searching my heart, nowhere is the sound of leaving

julie murphy seavy   ©2017