Wood, Words, Worlds

The woodcutter cuts tracks
gullies, ravines, digs a landscape
of ink and its absence, draws
out each letter, rhyming the sky,
etches each figure
from dream and wood—

a leopard of billowing clouds,
crescents like apostrophes
in an airy field of midnight,
islands, whales, winds
that bend palm trees, swirl
oceans into waves.

The woodcutter slices away,
the less wood, the more detail.
The deeper the cut, the stronger the words.

Midnight clouds ferry the poet
away from intemperate words,
unravel the net of our new Babel.

Ink sinks into porous sheets.
Light rises from bared, scarred wood.