I never weary of looking at leafless trees. Poplars,
lindens, birches – everything that can be seen
from my window. I do not know what it is in them that is at once
so strange and intolerably beautiful, so that I always want
to do something, want to draw them,
or describe them, although I do not know how.
I do not know, either, how to describe what I feel
as I sit at the window and watch the swaying of the branches
in the growing twilight, a few crows
in the top of the old ash, the birch in front of the woodshed.
I simply write about them, name them:
Populus, Tilia, Betula, Ulmus, Fraxinus,
as some read mantras, some name saints.
And I feel better. Perhaps I even know
that in those treetops, branches, in that ordinary,
windy pattern, drawn in black on grey,
is something much more. As in the hollow of one’s hand:
Nature. Fate. The future. The poplars character.
The birch’s fate. The lindens temperament. It is very hard
to explain in words. Without words
it is hardly easier. The worlds of people
and of trees are so different. But still,
there is something so human, almost intelligible,
in that tangle of branches. It is like a script,
like a language that I do not understand, although I know
that what is written there
has long been known to me; it cannot be much different
from what can be read in books,
hands or faces.
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