The trees have shed everything in defiance of frozen air,
Nudely and bravely they boast of their strength with a stoic’s stare.
Their leaves have deserted them, their fruit has fallen, they don’t care.
The trees in January stand strong in loneliness, and bare.

Is their naked strength in the wind how they are supposed to be?
Do they welcome autumn, to rid themselves of their greenery?
Perhaps they don’t notice that the lives they gave have set them free?
They have lost something beautiful, but are they less of a tree?

Spring water flows into their roots, branches drop their icy weight,
The first sun-kissed buds emerge to witness the tree foliate.
But does the tree even notice this, its cause to celebrate?
The tree is at its life-giving most, but it does naught but wait.

The tree changes before me, and because of it I change, too.
But in that moment, when I love that tree, it feels nothing new.
And I think back, if the moment someone loved me, if I knew?
But I am too like the tree, oblivious to what is true.

Today she texts me, requests my company with her at the Modern Art museum downtown. Shrug on a coat, out into the winter air.

It is biting cold and left unchaperoned, my hands lead themselves to burrow into the down of my jacket pocket, where they fiddle with themselves for heat. The air tucks pale and the sun shirks the southern hills that flank the bay, framing the sky with its misdirected rays, and it makes my shadow long and light.
I think about what she said to me. How she rubbed her eyes when she stared deep into the sun between the trees, how she said it still left its mark in her vision even when we made our ways home.

And yet, why couldn’t I bear to look?

In and out of rowhouse shadows, I watch my own blink between the canopy of flaking, piebald birch trees that line the sidewalk. As I walk it lives and dies between the flickering leaves, tucked behind a natural shade--still, soon guided with my silent sure-step onward into that inanimate skyline, comes scarce to return to itself only in moments of sunny unobstruction—few and far between, the closer I get to downtown. At times I expect it to appear in one place, only to be surprised by its unpredictability—the way it stretches itself in angular relief, with supernatural zeal, to situate itself within the light; beyond any control or command.

Yet beyond the street an army of distorted silhouettes stilt themselves across the glass facades of unknown offices, dancing and flickering, painting the caving walls with unmistakable life. They march obedient to the cacophonous wanderings of city folk, those unspoken kin, an army of unarticulated fuzzy forms smeared across and in the spears of metal thrusting angry, jealous, into the sky—sapping the light, encumbering the grand city with their heavy towering darkness, seeping the day’s illuminating rays of their heat and majesty.

And yet, these floating individuals continue in lock-step, filled with indescribable finality, conveying their dripping, sliding doppelgangers across a foliate of empty reflective facades— with each purposed footfall further submitting their spectral shadow to the naked inundation of light—to exclaim to the sun their own simple, unpopular, infinitesimal form from which they receive their hostage.

Unnoticed, unaware, unknown; I stare up and watch, wonder, thought—my shadow splays itself hidden in the ****-soaked earth, full of trash and discarded waste, not worthy or willing to present itself in the innumerable fold of people—relegates itself to the cool undertone of shadowed street, invisible and diffused rather imperceptively into the homogeneous grey of asphalt.

By the time I reach our meeting place, I naught distinguish my own pendulous shadow from the forest of dead steel spires that propped their long coats across the wintered streets.

Parable of Torvisco: “branched among the thickets of ignorance, their foliated stems speak of the white blood that has fallen from the souls that resiliently endured the solitude of their limbs and who enjoyed their ruddy bark and the pubescence of the Daphnes that gawked at over them turned into Laurel, she being a spatulate flower of Vernarth, like Apollo elliptically adoring her with the underside, and something fuzzy hiccuping over the teachings of someone who is not loved. Being the Daphniform Torvisco, of appressed retractable sepals that are pronounced on the laurels in Dafnomancia of the pubescent Torvisco on the first ******* of Daphne, leaving the ovoid crusts near the foliate stolon of the grayish spurs on the fins of the Pelecaniformes Petrobusjos, leaving the Malloga the lice. of their plumage that they are eaten by laurels, as a carminative antispasmodic digestive degassing, in the flora of the intestinal Torvisco engulfed by their pride and eagerness of nobility.

Parable of Sacred Bud: “first the animals and the buds that emanated from the inflorescences were venerated, as gods of the occult sprouting from the long-lived saps being miscellaneous family taxonomies that were consecrated to gods trapped by the mists of their foliage, over the colonies of other species with outbreaks of bud expiration in the distant buds of the leaves, towards non-renewable woody plants, for critical tempering to germinate on the dogma of woody herbaceous plants, as sacred shoots of ferns without their cell walls. Here is the tree of evil and good, sprouting one of each but as hyper-sprouting, which deceived the eyes of those who wanted to cut it because of the human snooping in bloom, on the shores of Medea's hands, growing on the shore of a headless river deity, who was not yet poisoned by an Olympian gesture, agreeing to have long fragrant and rosy hair on the pubescent teenagers who dared to call themselves Medea "

(Prócoro redoubling his sinister imagination of the Rosé of the Witches and grotesques, he was still ecstatic at the expectation of the extensions of the Rosary of the Evangelista San Juan simulated in the crowned Torvisco, for purposes of the genetics of the world in the hands of pubescent bodies that were embodied in the bodies and their stolons, like retrograde shoots going towards the spheres of the pelecaniform Petrobus and its little lice that resided in it as vital alarms. Structuring thus, the grazing that ran from its wings with vigorous fine pediculosis, which was abstracted from the scalps Medea decked out in megalomania in the sprouts of the Enchanted Torvisco)