A tree by Caleb Cluff

a man's hand resting on its trunk, alive,
 hard-hammered, peened to a copper brawn,
 veins like long-dead signatures.
 The skin on the knuckle topographed with a history at rest; 
 the nails ripple-skeined, and each whorl riven 
 with the containment of summer and earth.
 Gap a glimmer here, a breath,

and in the sun, the hour-blind sun,
that hand becomes a swarm of words
humming in her blister heat,
telling the tree 'we are but close'.
As intimate as that,
as the laying of a cheek upon a chest,
as lulling a tree to sleep.

Yet that hard hand, old brown root rogue
who should know better, keeps a pet wry tongue;
has lived in the cities of honey and seen, once or twice,
tenderness disrobed and the treachery of sleep;
thrums a finger on the bark, forming the well-worn arabesque
as his pliers twist the wire ever tighter. Job done.

His sun a chorus of bees
whose possession is a passionate gleam
never nearer.