Sycamore & Ash        If the sycamore on my front lawn were able to speak, & did, I would not understand.        I would not understand this sycamore speech not because all the world's translators could not help me, not because of a failure of translation, but because I would be, as I am so far in my common life, unable to find anything that would translate into speech itself. The sycamore's would be pure presence, the natural act of soul undivided from itself, a wholeness of essence, a fused utterance, while I attempted, in effect, to find a meaningful cipher for the vowel of a single leaf. A sycamore sheds bark as I shed hair & skin, is a creature of soil & water & sunlight as I am, but if it spoke I would be in the aura of speech speaking, & my ego, which insists on equivalents & rational mind, would be shocked & baffled.        At the same time, the sycamore does communicate, of course. Wind vibrates its leaves, its branches rub together, it makes sounds, yes, but I mean something else. Its innate speech is one of moving forms & colors; its lines coalesce, its resemblances dissipate & rearrange, its dumb music is at once opening theme, transitional passage, & melody, if I could hear, dear god that speaks plants & weather & animals & human beings such as myself, help me to hear this shifting meditation of visible matter, this companion.        In related prayer, I almost begin to hear, again, in this present, a thirty-year-old poem of mine, another tree, "The Eternal Ash": By early August, the mountain ash's each limb hangs heavy, its berry clusters already tinged orange and bending its body almost to breaking. The ash bears, and will, this light, this weight. Even at night under the frost stars, each berry deepens into the ripe flame autumn means for it to be, yes, but to know one thing, but know it: the lord of the whole tree, in time, unchanged, its changes mine, delusion; knowing, now, the mystical winter blossom.... Which August is this, anyway? — this windless poise of clusters that never fall, but will, within the living tree that withers, while ashlight drifts to the earth, petal by petal. William Heyen Pig Notes & Dumb Music: Prose on Poetry BOA Editions, Ltd. Copyright © 1998 by William Heyen. All rights reserved. Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.