Stick Tree

                       Black Swamp Dryad

From such I am made. My local
turf a black swamp atop
a geological midden,

braced by moraines and beach ridges,
where ground down things gathered
to grind each other, pulverizing

the lot into clay paste.
Here the last ice apocalypse
collapsed into a river,

thawing what had been tundra,
the melt slicing through the till,
silt, and clast bits trapped in caliche

to yield a glacial flour
so fine sized that barely dust
was left of what were mountains

(the crags first worn featureless)
then rolled and patted into
the clay of lacustrine me

sitting lodged atop the limestone
bedrock of what was sea floor,
all around me a compressed

flatness where-- in spite of stands
of oak, pine, of weathered barns
providing some brief relief--

the horizon seems infinite,
the added volumes of air
so magnifying tonight’s

moon that its klieg light glare
causes each and every thing
to briefly cast something

approaching its daytime shadow.
I am made from the Teays
lost riverbed, something

malleable, gray with bruise
blue streaks. Something not cast,
but molded, rolled, stretched, then smushed--

a torso with leafless limbs,
a thing fired by the light
of a small distant sun.