A friend sent me a photo he took of many facets. Sky, trees, grove, ground. The ground slopes to the East, and a grove of five-lobed and five-pointed leaf vines are bountiful, and nothing of the taller ones is lost on them; the small skittering creatures of night and day use them as shelter in light rain.
The share of the grove are the deciduous ones and their opposite.
The deciduous ones are captured offering gold to the patch of sky they have known all their life. Their whole life they’ve reached toward it. On this day cool, clear autumn blue and the precious-material offering of gold from the decline that is autumn. The loss of capillary action, the arthritis. The cramp in each leaf transforms the leaf matter to material gold. In days, outside the confines of this photograph, most of them will fall crisped and curled beyond gold to brown and grey to earth to mulch to rise again.
But now, the contrived now of photo, golden arms offer the sky more deeply golden bowls filled with the complete offerings of their past year of life, the deciduous ones.
Another share of the grove, the evergreens are dark-blue-green velvet lush and steadfast. Their own candle offerings of fire and cone will weigh down the emptiness and clarity to weep, therefore rain, therefore provide.
The ground slopes. And exactly where the eye refuses to stop because it is looking for the meaning to bring back, for the story to be told, off center and eastern, a deciduous one is mottled white and bare. It is stag horned regal. It is the only one of the grove able to lift its hooves and dance.