A place for the silent things

The Oak

You may come here to remember, to forget,
to deny it ever happened, to see what limbs
and shadows might offer, branches of comfort,
leaves of change, acorns of hope, the triumph
of trunks twisting over a persistence of roots.

Here owls might convene to tell stories, their
tales left in talkless feathers among pellets filled
with the fine bones of spent quarry, wrong place,
wrong time, careless paths taken by cruelties
of happenstance, hunger, predation unmasked.

One might suppose there are many ways to
speak of such things, and to be sure there are,
but I cannot know how I do what I do in this,
this approaching of a barbed perimeter where
dark bark and scattered light pierce the holdfast.



Voices refuse to carry beyond the outstretch of what
might heal here. This is a place for the silent things
of this world, wherein the unspoken might find
a muted eloquence: part forgetting, part reliving,
part banishing, and the brutal necessity of embracing.

That there are places like this is testament to the
underlying wisdom of our natures, one enduring,
one given to the seasons of its shared passing,
sky and substrate, rain and mud, breath and the
blanket of bone all things must bear in dear time.

Joseph Gallo
October 8, 2014