I was a boy myself once so don’t need
much told me about trees. I know to hide
in their boughs and filch their illicit fruit
before it falls to the ground and takes root.
I know to shinny up high then clamber
to where branches thin and the climber
feels a pit suddenly yawn in his guts,
up where twigs extend to buds, where height hurts.
Something about a tree doesn’t really mind
the theft of its fruit. A tree is resigned
to a boy swaying in his tenuous
crotch, dizzy at his chosen precipice.
Something about a tree wants to be climbed.
Something about a boy wants to climb it.
***
Probably the less said about this poem, the better: a distant echo of Frost’s “Birches”, this crypto-sonnet bears the alternative title “Onanism”. Related to this earlier poem, “Sad To Be a Child”.