by Kate Braid

Vancouver Art Gallery 42.3.63
oil on paper

Stand back! This tree is going places!
It’s a thunder of branches,
a wilderness of wind,
a highwayman riding.

Here’s a dark and stormy night, teamster’s whip
as tree boughs whistle and lock
to the sharp brown shouts of cedar and pine
and there’s the small green bullet at the heart of things.

Notice how this tree doesn’t fall but lays itself
down, gives itself when no one is looking,
to love, to a wild desire.

Night’s eyelashes blink wide in shock.
Moon blanches. Sky is a memory.
What is real is this—love unleashed,
an epic of tree trunk and limbs.

So ride, ride on my beauty! Now we know
woodsmen only carry their axes
to cut themselves free. Ride on!

Kate Braid has published four prize-winning books of poetry, the most recent being A Well-Mannered Storm: The Glenn Gould Poems (Caitlin Press). She co-edited In Fine Form with Sandy Shreve, the first book of Canadian form poetry. She has also written three books of creative nonfiction, and her poems and essays have been widely anthologized. She
lives in Vancouver, B.C.