From A Window - Christian Wiman

[Larry Robinson]

>From A Window
 
Incurable and unbelieving
in any truth but the truth of grieving,
 
I saw a tree inside a tree
rise kaleidoscopically
 
as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.
I pressed my face as close
 
to the pane as I could get
to watch that fitful, fluent spirit
 
that seemed a single being undefined
or countless beings of one mind
 
haul its strange cohesion
beyond the limits of my vision
 
over the house heavenwards.
Of course I knew those leaves were birds.
 
Of course that old tree stood
exactly as it had and would
 
(but why should it seem fuller now?)
and though a man's mind might endow
 
even a tree with some excess
of life to which a man seems witness,
 
that life is not the life of men.
And that is where the joy came in.
 
	- Christian Wiman