"Tree" by Vijay Seshadri

Tree

for Richard Wilbur


Three streets south of where I sit

is a city park with a plane tree in it.

From any place you choose to enter,

the tree forms the park's pole and perfect center.

Its slight, heliotropic, side-

wise bias, its height, and its wide,

rustling canopy all testify that it has won

its long negotiations with the sun,

and now simply distributes the breeze,

and keeps guard over these

ruminant people who stand before

the local memorial to the war

or sit on the benches ordering the mess

and stilling the noise of consciousness,

while the tree arches above them, serene,

mottled, magnificent, Platonic, and green.

Source of the text - Vijay Seshadri, The Long Meadow.  Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004, page 30.

TJB: At his desk, Audenesque, the poet makes a gem of a miniature in couplets: a tree that is more than a tree, an anti-jar placed in an anti-Tennessee.