Branch

Next morning I see a sizzling golden-brown branch. A crawling stack of roots. Stones with faces. The forest is full of abandoned monsters …
—Tomas Tranströmer^*

that old branch, crackling

through the gargle and glimmer of the calls,
the looped cells,

the glassy fallen light, frothing wattle
and brown snakes pouring
out of nowhere,

it sprays into fingers and crinkling white legs and curls
into innumerable dimensions, tilts

and rolls
into a twisted, neuronal lexicon

but its tendency
to step over hidden spaces,
to slip into foregrounds and
belie its own,
sprawling presence, signals,
like a rising temperature,

a confusion, a swarm of brailed data
pouring from radiant nerves,

leaving trails of parasites across the pupils—
what we look beyond to find:

frond, split pods, the fine
skeleton

of a flipped leaf and
somewhere, hopefully, the dull blaze
of an escarpment

with drowsy totems dotted
along a baked track

^* ‘How the Late Autumn Night Novel Begins’, trans. Robin Fulton.