The Wishing Tree
I stand neither in the wilderness nor fairyland but in the fold of a green hill the tilt from one parish into another. To look at me through a smirr of rain is to taste the iron in your own blood because I hoard the common currency of longing: each wish each secret assignation. My limbs lift, scabbed with greenish coins I draw into my slow wood fleur-de-lys, the enthroned Brittania. Behind me, the land reaches toward the Atlantic. And though I’m poisoned choking on the small change of human hope, daily beaten into me look: I am still alive— in fact, in bud.