Twin-trunked willow flicking broken rocks with dangling tresses;
parting your rustling green curtains offers entry to a private glade.
Your yellow leaves clog the base of a once-fountain. Breezes shimmy your
moving walls. Sun spatters on the revealed bright floor. A stool.
Look up. Hugely knotted heads top your severely pollarded mainstays.
You defy easy climbing access from ground level. Crustily upright,
you'd cross your arms if you could. If you were a spider, you'd be
a Daddy Longlegs. Unspectacularity's your scene, genus Salix. Yet your
fat, drain-disturbing roots, way longer than your branches, extend
to all quarters of the front lawn. Tracking down water, some erupt
into periscopic elbows, the better to mess with motor mower blades.
Admitting and rejecting light, you don't so much weep as shelter;
and provide: elastic green whips for me, cricket clubs for older boys.
From height, your gathered vines offer Tarzan-style airy swinging freedom.
Unlike Ophelia who slipped to her burbling death from your broken arms,
I always felt safe, perched on your mottled bark, ladder angled below,
listening to your whispery sweeping. So benign, so readily accepting.
You barely whimper with each sharp serrated bushsaw action.
One cent per footlong fleshy limb, I'm promised; two cents for bark-encrusted
thicker bits. When Dad returns, I'll have cut enough for a pack of smokes.
Bill Wootton
12 December 12
P S Alexander Pope apparently planted some willow twig cuttings used to bind a parcel from Spain to Lady Suffolk which took and created English weepers, a fact I have been unable to insert in the above snap.
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