Revisionist Poetry – “Suburban Reliquary” – A Bit of Goldsworthy & Adams, v.2

The sun presses through the leaves on this dry afternoon
as I wander the small suburban wood
searching for fallen trunks,
for branches bleached open by weather and time—

the kind of accidental arrangement
Goldsworthy might have welcomed,
the kind of light
Ansel Adams would have sharpened into silence.

The ground gives under my steps,
a brittle crackle of leaf mold and dust,
and the air itself seems parched,
as if the trees have been holding their breath.

Around me, the living trees stand upright,
quiet as witnesses.
But the fallen ones arrest me:
their limbs splayed in rough angles,
their bark split into weathered seams,
their forms both collapse and composition.

Here is a lattice of shadow.
Here, a curve carved by rot.
Here, a trunk laid open
like a sentence half-erased by rain.

What remains is not simply ruin
but a second shape,
made by drought, gravity, and time,
a brief and unexpected art
the forest keeps making
from what it loses.