Along an ancient thought-tree

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 2005 by Naiman, Anatoly

to Isaiah

As light stripes a tree-trunk, heat streams through the ashes, steam puffs

from lips on its trip to others, attended by phrases,

so a thought about bark, a crowd and a bonfire slips off

to serve as a prop in the Theater of Shades.

Flying to an alder, scrambling up, the thought is

about how I've balanced a load of brush

and am grasping the meaning of un-caught words:

that thought was and is a wolverine, and its form-the branch.

Sweep everything backstage, to your very last mite,

all that you had, all you found so exhausting.

I didn't hear the words but waved as I followed their flight,

and their fate was this: the Theater of Things, not of straw men.

The nervous ignition of speech, after all, is breath,

its sound can't be lessened, once in the listener's ear:

what was for us a sound will become the stage,

and what for us is memory-the overture.

tr. Margo Shohl Rosen