Last Night's Dream

I sing tree, making green

school after school of leaf-fish

flicker between the shade and sunlight

in nets of branch,

urging the students to see, to see—

and one says: I like

the brown tree. So I look:

she has conjured

one of those scrawny northern cedars,

arbor vitae, dead or alive, one can't tell,

earth-brown, sprouting

bits of dry fern-frond from random twigs,

disregarded;

and this tree, behold,

glows from within;

haloed in visible

invisible gold.