Camouflage

Roo Borson
From:   Night Walk, Selected Poems. Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1994.

The tree which untangles
at the far end of the noisy meadow
stands apart from evening,
does not own itself.

Birds come to it and go
because it is like another
because they are like others.

Free of the sun
which is said to tangle other branches,
it is free of the gossip of likenesses,
and the stars do not sit in it.

The fruit of this tree,
if it has any,
is not seen in the unaided light,
and the eye which sees it
loses need of mirrors,
becomes
the eye-shaped slit
in the mask which an animal
that comes out now to hunt for sustenance
is.

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