Just yesterday afternoon I heard a man <br />Say he lived in a house with no windows <br />The door of which was locked on the outside. <br />This was at a party in New York, New York. <br />A deep Oriental type, I said to myself, <br />One of them indescribable Tebootans who <br />Habitate on Quaker Heights and drink <br />Mulled kvass first thing every morning <br />With their vitamins. An asshole. And <br />Haven't I more years than he? Haven't <br />I spent them looking out the window <br />At the trees? Oh the various trees. <br />They have looked back at me with their <br />Homely American faces: the hemlocks <br />And white birches of one of my transient <br />Homes, the catalpas and honey locusts <br />Of another, the sweet gum and bay and <br />Coffee trees, the hop hornbeam and the <br />Spindle tree, the dogwood, the great. <br />Horse chestnut, the overdressed pawpaw <br />Who is the gamin of that dominion. <br />Then, behind them, the forest, the sodality. <br />What pizzazz in their theorizing! How fat <br />The sentimentibilities of their hosannas! <br />I have looked at them out the window <br />So intently and persistently that always <br />My who-I-am has gone out among them <br />Where the fluttering ideas beckon. Yes, <br />We've been best friends these sixty-nine <br />Years, standing around this hot stove <br />Of a world, hawking, phewing, guffawing, <br />My dear ones, who will remember me <br />For a long, long time when I'm gone.<br /><br />Hayden Carruth<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-way-of-the-coventicle-of-the-trees/
