Arms and the Myth

A bright day in Midwest winter--today--almost crystalline--almost quartz not ice--from inside my office windows. Is almost a day at home, despite that it isn't. The bald tree line is almost chaparral. Second floor light lets the sky in, and the office hangs, sundialing all day, which is what makes this space habitable space, even as by this time each year I feel the increments in my old clock sticking between this and that: no daylight savings in AZ: hanging on for dear life, as C. K. Williams says in his amazing poem, "The Tract," not to the tree arms so much as to the truth in the myth of the tree. Or the myth in the arms:

A young saguaro develops under the indifferent but indispensable care of a nurse tree, most often a palo verde (Cercidium spp.), desert ironwood (Olneya tesota), or mesquite (Prosopis spp.). The nurse tree shelters the saguaro from extreme heat and frost, and from foraging animals. It takes 25 years on average for the cactus to grow a foot high. As it matures and develops its first arms at between 50 to 100 years of age, the saguaro may sap enough water and nutrients from the surrounding soil to kill off its aging nurse.

Days like this I forget how much I'm failing. I leave my building tonight and walk towards my darker lot. The thousand black crows rise at once from the trees and descend, terrible again. It's the so many invisible sound of their wings, it's how they live.