Askr and Embla
You are beautiful like a sequoia tree.
I know this by the amber in your eyes
and the Heaven bound height that makes it
impossible not to fall for you.
Even your name means you were meant
to be a flowering plant, a teller
of love mes and love me nots.
I might seem like a man
writing through his crisis of wanting
but, honestly, I’m a boy playing
with a pocket knife, a pair of initials,
and a shot through heart.
You are that rare species that grows strongest
in the incandescence of a forest fire
but lacking that heat, I can now count
the branching of veins though your pallor.
Dryad, you haven’t met my hands,
the creators of words, the warmth of their holding,
nor my arms that want nothing more
than to hug trees. Sequoia –
a word borrowed from the Iroquois,
masters of hiding their talk in the winds.
I use this romantic code
so you could get the meaning before you get the message:
I like you. I think you’re out of my league.
I think you’re most beautiful when you’re standing still and planted.
Your ears peek out like leaves;
you would have been Robert Frost’s wet dream
and now I’m just rambling but they say
that’s the 1st sign of tree blindness.
I use a language you don’t know
so maybe you’d start to understand
how I wonder at the aurora arborealis
that always seems to follow you.
It’s strange because
I know the rain,
know when it falls,
know when it stays in the clouds,
waiting for the sun to make its rounds
so it could serenade the lovers with its timpani drums
and I know the sun rays,
the straight laced kiss
of their unraveled fists.
I know the Earth, its magi’s gift,
its cradling lush, the generosity
with which it shares its soiled blood.
I just can’t figure out
how you add up
to so much more
than the simple sum
of all this music, mercy,
and martyrdom.
